A federal cabinet minister's aide killed the release of a sensitive report requested under freedom-of-information in a case eerily similar to a notorious incident in the sponsorship scandal.
A bureaucrat had to make a mad dash to the department's mailroom last July to retrieve the report at the last minute under orders from a senior aide to then-Public Works minister Christian Paradis.
The order was issued by Sebastien Togneri, parliamentary affairs director to Mr. Paradis, in a terse email after he had been told the file was already on its way to The Canadian Press, which had requested it.
"Well unrelease it," Mr. Togneri said in a July 27 email to a senior official in the department's Access to Information section. "What's the point of asking for my opinion if you're just going to release it!"
The document was an annual report on Public Works' massive real-estate portfolio, which contained factual information on high vacancy rates and weak returns on investment. Such reports had never been made public before.
The department's real-estate branch had consented to the full release, and the Access to Information office at Public Works had determined after extensive consultation that there was no legal basis to withhold any of the report.
The file, though, was deemed "sensitive" - partly because it was a media request - and was sent to the Conservative minister's office for review. The office initially gave the green light, but had a change of heart on the very day it was being mailed out.
Mr. Togneri insisted that only one small section of the report be released, despite the uniform view among Access to Information officials that the entire 137-page document could not be withheld under the legislation.
The matter was eventually brought to the attention of the department's director-general, Sylvia Seguin-Brant, who wrote a memorandum arguing that despite objections from the minister's office, the entire report should indeed be released.
"The decision has been made in a fair, reasonable and impartial manner with respect to the processing of this request," she wrote, referring to the bureaucrats' handling of the file.
The decision to release the entire document was made after consulting with Justice Department lawyers.
In the end, though, the department released only a heavily censored version just as Mr. Togneri had insisted - 82 days later than allowed under the law. The final release included just 30 pages.
Internal documents showing how Public Works handled the file were released to The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.
The incident is reminiscent of another Public Works report, on the sponsorship scandal, requested by a Globe and Mail reporter a decade ago.
The Gomery Commission into the scandal determined in 2004 that the minister's office tried to interfere with the release of the report. In that case, the senior public servant in charge of Access to Information, Anita Lloyd, decided the move was unethical and illegal.
After consulting her personal lawyer three times, Ms. Lloyd refused to sign off on the file.
When her resistance became widely known, she was hailed as a hero for standing up to her political masters, when the department was headed by then Liberal minister Alfonso Gagliano.
The latest incident is a rare glimpse into the murky world of so-called "amber-lighted" or "red-flagged" Access to Information requests, terms applied to files the government deems politically sensitive and which are subject to close review by a minister's political staff.
Mr. Paradis was shuffled last month to the Natural Resources portfolio, taking Mr. Togneri with him as his director of parliamentary affairs.
Mr. Togneri did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Paradis's current communications director said Mr. Togneri's intervention was to suggest the Access to Information section offer fewer pages to the requester without charge rather than the entire 137 pages for a fee of $27.40, which had already been paid.
