Tim Duncan arrived in Victoria last spring, did a brief stint with the B.C. Liberal government as a political aide that didn’t work out and then moved back to Calgary and pondered his West Coast experience.
It was generally disappointing. He did a short stint in Transportation Minister Todd Stone’s office and was moved to a different department before being let go by the government several months after he started. As he was considering his B.C. tenure, there was one particular incident that rankled. So he sat down and wrote a letter.
It was the basis for one of the three indictments Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham dropped on the government this week, and it’s the most interesting one.
His letter concerned a routine request for information that was copied to all staff so they could retrieve the documents requested. They were about the issue of the missing women on Highway 16. He asked another aide — George Gretes — for advice on what to do with the emails on his computer that might or might not be relevant.
After exhaustive investigation, Denham concluded this is what happened: Gretes came over and took a quick look at what the search had yielded. He wasn’t too happy that Duncan had records. Without opening any of the email summaries, he told him: “You got to get rid of these.”
Duncan hesitated, so Gretes took over his keyboard and deleted the emails, then deleted them from the deleted file, then deleted them again. It’s the now-notorious triple-delete move.
It’s like locating all the documents someone requested on a sensitive topic and setting fire to them, then flushing the ashes. You couldn’t devise a more suspicious response if you tried.
Duncan also shared the letter with the Opposition. When they raised it in the legislature last spring, there was a brief furor. The government discounted Duncan as a disgruntled ex-employee and Premier Christy Clark assured the house everybody knows the rules and everybody should be following them.
Gretes repeatedly denied the incident, including while under oath during Denham’s formal investigation. But she eventually concluded that he was lying. He was dismissed this week and the file has been turned over to the RCMP.
As far as Duncan is concerned, the commission report this week completely vindicates him as a whistleblower who called the government on a shady practice.
The report found he had no particular animus toward the government and didn’t seem like someone who was seeking the public limelight or retribution.
He had nothing to gain from making the claims and “it may be a challenge for him to ever work again in the political realm.”
Reached in Calgary, Duncan said he is glad it’s all behind him and he’s at peace with what he did.
“Hopefully, people will look at this and realize there are problems,” he said.
He said the civil service treats FOI properly, but the political side — those dozens of politically appointed people who are closest to ministers — “just feel like it’s a joke or not important.”
The actual emails were quite likely innocuous notes that revealed nothing of substance, he said. It’s likely they were triple-deleted based on an instinctive response to evade and bypass freedom of information.
Clark said on Friday the government is responding to far more FOI requests than previously, but the law is being applied differently by individuals. She has ordered an end to deleting any emails pending a review. Duncan deserves some credit for the big reset that’s coming on the government’s “freedom from freedom of information” approach.
Just So You Know: There’s a particularly telling line in the commissioner’s report. She put everyone in Stone’s office through the wringer while probing the allegations, including an administrative co-ordinator with two years experience in B.C. and 13 years in Alberta. “She testified that she did not know what triple-deleting was or how to do it until she came to B.C.
“She recalled that the reason she was given for triple-deleting was because there was a lot of confidential and sensitive information ‘and we need to make sure … it’s not out there.’ ”
