Time for a deeper look into why Premier Christy Clark’s office has no records to produce
VICTORIA — Earlier this year, information watchdog Elizabeth Denham set out to investigate whether the government really had “no records” regarding the departure of the premier’s chief of staff, Ken Boessenkool.
Boessenkool resigned in September after a two-week investigation by the head of the government personnel agency into his conduct with a female staffer in an incident in a Victoria bar.
Given the potential for legal action, it seemed unlikely that such a sensitive matter would have been conducted without anyone keeping a documentary record.
Nevertheless, when reporter Jonathan Fowlie of The Vancouver Sun filed a request under provincial access to information legislation, the Liberals claimed to have no records of any kind, paper or electronic.
Fowlie then probed further by filing a complaint to Information and Privacy Commissioner Denham. Her office was already in the midst of an inquiry into the growing number of cases where the government claimed “no records” in response to information requests, particularly from the news media.
Fowlie’s complaint dovetailed with that work, because many of those non-responses originated with the premier’s office. Denham expanded on her inquiry to include the Boessenkool case.
That led to a sit-down interview in early February between Denham’s investigators and Kim Haakstad, then deputy chief of staff to Premier Christy Clark and not yet the household name she would become after she was forced to resign over the government’s toxic ethnic outreach strategy.
Haakstad proceeded to justify the lack of written record on the Boessenkool departure by insisting that was standard operating procedure.
“The general practice within the office of the premier is to communicate verbally in person,” she told investigators, according to the information commissioner’s report on that and other matters released Monday.
“Email communications usually consist of requests to make telephone calls or meet in person. Generally, staff members in the office of the premier do not make substantive communication relating to business matters via email.”
Even where they do resort to electronic communication, “most of the emails are transitory in nature and are deleted once a permanent record, such as a calendar entry, is created.” Did the deputy chief of staff have any email exchange with Boessenkool on this matter?
“Ms. Haakstad believes that there would have been email communications between her and the former chief of staff during the relevant period, but these emails would have been transitory in nature and were deleted before the access request was received.”
As to what constitutes “transitory” communications, those were said to include missives of “temporary usefulness” such as: “Drafts. Phone messages. A meeting request. Copy of an incoming letter to the premier. Only required for a limited time or for preparation for an ongoing record. Not required to meet statutory obligations or to sustain administrative functions.”
“In general, the office of the premier possesses very little non-transitory information, particularly email,” the investigators were assured: “The office of the premier is a small public body whose functions are administrative in nature. It does not deliver programs, develop legislation or write briefing notes. Therefore, it does not create most of the categories of records that ministries create.”
So, to recap: Nothing of a substantive nature gets written down in the premier’s office in the first place. Business is conducted orally and in person. Email is used only for minor matters and those are sent to the electronic dumpster straightaway.
Such was the story told by Haakstad to the investigators on Feb. 6. Now contrast that with the way of doing business in the premier’s office that was on display three weeks later, when the New Democrats tabled the multicultural strategy.
The 17-page strategy was distributed by Haakstad herself to a number of government insiders via email. It laid out how public servants and Liberal political staff should work together to reach out to various ethnic communities, then bend those efforts to boost the re-election chances of the Liberal party.
In short, it was a detailed and ambitious set of marching orders on a major matter of public policy — precisely the sort of thing that was supposedly never produced in written form in the premier’s office, according to what the investigators were told by Clark’s official representative.
But the strategy does exist, along with a covering note that explains how the inner circle tried to escape public scrutiny for their efforts on behalf of the premier and party. It was distributed outside the government email server via a network of personal accounts maintained by everyone on the premier’s distribution list.
The practice of using personal emails for surreptitious public policy-making has occasionally been revealed through earlier leaks. But the ethnic outreach emails provide the most extensive documentation of the practice in a case linked directly to the office of the premier. They also directly contradict the “nothing in writing” assurances provided by Clark’s office just weeks before the leak.
One can only hope Denham seizes this opportunity to reopen her investigation, this time focusing on the use and abuse of the back channel as a way of making public policy while avoiding public scrutiny.
vpalmer@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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Warning from B.C.'s privacy commissioner:
Mon, Mar 4: The privacy commissioner is concerned the Liberal government has stopped keeping records to avoid public scrutiny. Aaron McArthur reports.
1 comment:
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