It’s mighty handy to have thoughtfully passed a law against deleting official records — that includes no penalties whatsoever — just before you start breaking that law with abandon:
Top Liberal staffers — even in former premier Dalton McGuinty’s office — illegally deleted emails tied to the $585-million gas plant scandal, a parliamentary watchdog has found.
“It’s clear they didn’t want anything left behind in terms of a record on these issues,” Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian said Wednesday.
Her findings came in a scathing 35-page report prompted by NDP complaints that key Liberal political staff have no records on the controversial closures of plants in Mississauga and Oakville before the 2011 election.
However, despite breaking the Archives and Recordkeeping Act and “undermining” freedom-of-information legislation, the scofflaws will not face penalties because there are none, said Cavoukian.
“That’s the problem,” she said, noting the inadequate legislation was passed by the McGuinty Liberals. “It’s untenable. It has to have teeth so people just don’t engage in indiscriminate practices.”
Attorney General John Gerretsen said the government would consider changes.
“Any law, in order to be effective, there have to be some sort of penalty provisions,” he said. “We’ll take a look.”
If I were a betting man, I’d say that the chances of this “look” producing anything useful would be less than 1 in 10. If this were a private firm or an individual accused of deleting records that the government had an interest in seeing, I rather suspect they’d creatively find something in the existing body of law to use as a bludgeon. It’s charming that they didn’t think to include any penalties if the culprit was a government employee.
