A steel frame, shown Feb. 21, 2013, is all that's left of a gas plant that was supposed to be built in Mississauga.FRED LUM/The Globe and Mail
As the Liberals battled to contain the fallout from the gas-plant scandal, the top adviser to then-premier Dalton McGuinty sent a detailed memo to senior aides on how to delete e-mails and ensure they could not be retrieved.
Later, the government billed taxpayers $10,000 to pay the husband of a top party official to wipe computer hard drives in Mr. McGuinty's office.
These revelations came Thursday from a newly unsealed court document, in which police accuse the Liberals of trying to make sure "damaging information" on the billion-dollar cancellation of the plants would not see the light of day.
Ontario Provincial Police are investigating Mr. McGuinty's last chief of staff, David Livingston. They allege he brought in an outside IT expert, Peter Faist, to erase records from the computers of Liberal staffers in the dying days of Mr. McGuinty's premiership. Mr. Faist is the husband of Laura Miller, who was Mr. Livingston's deputy.
Mr. Livingston has maintained he did nothing wrong. The accusations have not been tested in court and no charges have been laid in the matter. No one else is under investigation, and Mr. McGuinty has said he was not aware of the e-mail deletions in his office.
The document, a 130-page Information to Obtain prepared by Ontario Provincial Police Detective-Constable André Duval to get a search warrant for the investigation, details information police found by recovering e-mails from government hard drives.
In August of 2012, Mr. Livingston e-mailed six other staffers, including Ms. Miller, to say he had spoken with government IT staff about how e-mails could be erased and not recovered. In the preceding weeks, a legislative committee investigating the gas plants had started ordering the government to turn over records related to the cancellations.
In his memo, reproduced in the documents, Mr. Livingston wrote that if e-mails were erased from the inbox and the deleted file, "they are gone and cannot be retrieved." He noted some e-mails are stored on backup tapes, but that information from those tapes had never before been subject to a freedom of information disclosure: "I don't think we need to worry," he wrote. Mr. Livingston then instructed one staffer to purge all e-mail accounts of past employees to "make sure any e-mails hanging around are double deleted.
"Having said all of this, nothing is more confidential than talking rather than writing!" he concluded.
Despite discussing the gas plants in various e-mails during the summer of 2012, both Mr. Livingston and Ms. Miller claimed to have no records related to the cancellations when they were presented with freedom of information requests, the documents say.
In early 2013, as Mr. McGuinty was preparing to leave office, Mr. Livingston and Ms. Miller brought in Mr. Faist to wipe government computers. Mr. Livingston and Ms. Miller – who described the deletions as "Pete's project" in one e-mail – discussed how Mr. Faist would delete the computer files of nine Liberal staffers, eight of whom were involved in e-mail exchanges over the gas plants.
"It is a reasonable conclusion to draw that efforts were made to [ensure] that potential damaging information would not be made available," through a freedom of information request or to the legislative committee, Det.-Const. Duval wrote.
Mr. Faist was paid $10,000 from the "Liberal Caucus," he told police. Liberal Caucus Services is a taxpayer-funded office that pays for day-to-day expenses related to work in the legislature.
Mr. Faist's payment was handled by Dave Gene, another of Mr. McGuinty's staffers, police say. Mr. Faist had done other work for Caucus Services, totalling $167,072.28, plus $57,036.08 out of Liberal party funds. Both entities ended Mr. Faist's contracts earlier this year, after his alleged role in the document deletions was revealed.
Using a Web search, Mr. Faist said he found a program called WhiteCanyon, which he used to erase 632,118 files from 20 computers.
Civil servants became concerned when they learned Mr. Livingston wanted to wipe computer hard drives. In an interview with police, then civil service head Peter Wallace said he told Mr. Livingston that "the only organizations that did not maintain records were criminal organizations."
Adrian Morrow