A vacuum of information in high places

As one of the political staffers in the office of former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty once wrote in the summer of 2012, this by way of an update to a colleague, “All gas plants all the time.”

That’s the way it was at Queen’s Park back then: The Opposition parties were wholly consumed with the issue of the government’s billion-dollar cancellation and relocation of the two controversial gas-fired plants in Mississauga and Oakville, and the government was equally consumed with denying them documents about what had happened or deflecting the attention of the press.

Operation Vapour was the name of the government’s internal project to manage the blowback, and thus it was no surprise when in the fall, a Freedom of Information request came in seeking information from the Office of the Premier for emails, memos and the like making reference to Project Vapour or Project Vapor from 2010 (when the government cancelled the first plant) through 2011 (when it cancelled the second plant) to 2012 (when it was still firmly embroiled in the chaos). file...and we should let them do their work.”

And both he and Miller were copied on numerous “Project Vapour” emails in the months before the FOI request.

The emails are in 400 usercreated files among a grand total of 632,000 files that were deleted on 20 computers in the office of the premier and later recovered by the Ontario Provincial Police, lawyers in the trial agreed in an admission.

The admission was in lieu of further testimony from retired OPP officer Robert Gagnon, a tech expert who retrieved the deleted files. Because he was deemed too close to the OPP investigation, he wasn’t allowed to take the stand as an expert, or give his opinion, at the trial.

Livingston and Miller, who were respectively McGuinty’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, are jointly charged with breach of trust and deleting data about the two gasfired plants that they were legally obliged to keep. They are pleading not guilty.

On Nov. 7, 2012, the formal response to the FOI request that had gone to 20 staffers in McGuinty’s office was that, as witness William Bromm, then and now a senior legal adviser on the public service side, told Ontario Court Judge Tim Lipson Friday, “records do not exist.”

How is it that more than a dozen of the greatest communicators of their generations — political staff tend to be bright and sophisticated — most with two BlackBerries on the go didn’t manage to send a single email or have a single document in an almost three-year period about the single subject that was dominating if not ruining their lives?

McGuinty abruptly resigned in October that year, proroguing the government, which put a temporary end both to unpleasant questions about gas plants and a Legislative committee motion to censure Bentley for contempt for his failure to produce records.

The answer may lie in an Aug. 9, 2012, email Livingston sent to Miller and others at the top of the food chain in McGuinty’s office.

It was a how-to on permanently deleting emails, the result of a briefing Livingston said he’d had from the head of IT.

Emails deleted from both a user’s inbox and deleted files box “are gone and cannot be retrieved,” he wrote. Premier’s office emails are “backed up for two weeks,” he said, which meant that the “double delete” had to happen the day an email was received to defeat the backup.

If it wasn’t, he said, “then a copy of that email will be in the backup system for 2 weeks notwithstanding it is now permanently gone from the system.”

But the good news, Livingston said, is that backups weren’t part of the system used for FOI requests, and “as such, I don’t think we need to worry about this back up process.”

He cheerfully added: “Having said all of this, nothing is more confidential than talking rather than writing!”

The trial continues Monday.