The Ontario Provincial Police did more to advance open government in B.C. this week than all the reports and arguments over the topic going back years.
In B.C., we’ve had studies about public-sector information management, endless recommendations about how to do it better and hours of legislative debate about disclosure and deletions. Until recently, it didn’t amount to much.
The OPP took a more direct route. They waded into an Ontario scandal related to hiding information and this week laid criminal charges against two people for deleting official records.
That tends to focus minds much more quickly on the need to do things properly. And because one of those charged moved from Ontario to a high-profile job with the B.C. Liberal Party, it gets as much attention here as there.
Laura Miller was a high-achieving young political staff member with the Ontario Liberal government. After the scandal that led to the deletion caper erupted there, she moved to the coast around the time of the 2013 election to work for the B.C. Liberals. She quickly become executive director, but resigned that post Thursday, moments after the charges against her were announced. She still has the presumption of innocence and is entitled to due process. But the charges are a searing lesson to political staffers everywhere, particularly in B.C.
Information and privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham landed on several of them this year over their cavalier attitude toward how email records are supposed to be treated. Many of the staff who work directly in cabinet ministers’ offices are party members. They all know the personable Miller, who was highly regarded inside the party.
Now they’ve watched her abruptly quit her job in response to criminal charges to do with the same general issue that Denham was condemning — deletion of emails.
Safe to assume people now are having second thoughts about “triple-deleting,” if they weren’t already.
The OPP aren’t the only cops establishing that there can be consequences for questionable handling of emails. Part of Denham’s report delved into the case of the minister’s aide who took over a rookie colleague’s keyboard and triple-deleted emails that were the subject of a freedom-of-information request. That stunt, and the aide’s questionable testimony to Denham under oath, led her to refer the matter to the RCMP. The status of that case is unknown, but a special prosecutor has been appointed, so it can be considered active.
The government retained a former commissioner — David Loukidelis — to advise on how to implement all Denham’s recommendations and his report was released the day before the Miller bombshell detonated. Part of his advice is to yank responsibility for responding to FOI requests from political staffers and give it to a “career public servant” in each minister’s office.
“The goal is to ensure that political staff involved in the day-to-day hurly-burly of political work are not in charge of searches for records,” he said.
That’s a nice way of saying they can’t be trusted with the job any more.
He also has some ideas on “transitory” records, an over-used designation that allows records to be deleted at will.
Oddly enough, that’s reportedly the rationale advanced for deleting the Ontario records, which related to a hugely controversial government decision involving power plants. The charges against Miller remain mysterious, because it was widely assumed she was not a target of the long-running investigation. Premier Christy Clark relied on that belief in hiring her in the first place.
“She is a person of integrity, and of course you know she’s not the target of this investigation,” Clark told reporters in April 2014.
Then-party president Sharon White also stressed: “It is important to note that Laura is not the target of the investigation.”
Nonetheless, today she’s in the news, under charges and out of a job.
The thrust of Loukidelis’s advice is a lot more training for everyone, with lessons on taking all the different aspects of information management a lot more seriously.
If they want to bring the lessons home, they should include in the slide show a montage of headlines and video clips about what happened to Laura Miller.
