Access to messages denied, Elsner hearing told
Deputy police complaint commissioner Rollie Woods says the lawyer representing the co-chairs of the Victoria police board refused to give him copies of 48 inappropriate Twitter messages involving Chief Frank Elsner when he asked for them in August 2015.
Lawyers representing Elsner and the Victoria and Esquimalt mayors told a B.C. Supreme Court hearing this week that commissioner Stan Lowe could have looked at the Twitter messages any time he wanted to.
“No, we couldn’t,” Woods said Thursday. “They wouldn’t give them to us. I thought it was so unusual not to provide us with the evidence needed.”
Lowe has come under fire for initially allowing the matter to proceed as an internal discipline matter rather than a public trust investigation. He later ordered an external investigation.
Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson presided this week over Elsner’s petition to quash that investigation. The police chief filed the petition in March, arguing that Lowe does not have the authority to order an investigation into conduct that has already been the subject of an internal probe.
Hinkson has reserved judgment to a future date.
During the three-day hearing in Vancouver, Hinkson appeared concerned by misleading information contained in an affidavit by Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins. The affidavit states that Desjardins, Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps and their lawyer, Marcia McNeil, met with Woods on Aug. 31, 2015.
“The meeting took place by phone and in the context of the [police complaint commissioner] having already reviewed the messages, the contents of which were discussed in that teleconference,” Desjardins wrote.
But the lawyers representing the chief and the mayors admitted that the messages were not delivered that day, and were not seen by Lowe until Dec. 9. If Desjardins was “dead wrong about that issue,” Hinkson questioned whether he could rely on her affidavit.
Woods also said there was never any arrangement with McNeil to pick up an envelope containing the Twitter messages.
Court heard that when Woods asked McNeil for the messages, she said she did not want to email or send a paper copy of them to his office. McNeil said she would bring them to a meeting at the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner on Aug. 31. However, she was ill that day, so the meeting took place over the phone, with her reading 10 to 15 of the 48 messages aloud.
Joe Doyle, the lawyer representing the mayors, told the court that McNeil left an envelope at her office with a paper printout of the Twitter messages, but it was never picked up. “Her understanding was that they had been. But, obviously, from what we’ve heard, they hadn’t,” Doyle said.
Woods said that version of events is not true.
“There was never any agreement that she would deliver them or leave it for us to pick up,” he said. “They are not being truthful if they said they prepared a package for us and there was some expectation we would pick it up and retrieve it.”
Desjardins has been criticized for misleading the media, first by denying Elsner was being investigated, then by saying an internal investigation by Vancouver lawyer Patricia Gallivan found no inappropriate relationship between Elsner and the wife of his subordinate officer. Desjardins declined to comment, saying the matter is before the courts.
Court heard that Gallivan had reviewed six months of “salacious and sexually charged” Twitter messages and learned of a hug and a kiss in the office between Elsner and the subordinate officer’s wife. She found the relationship to be inappropriate.