The punishment of a former ministerial aide in the “triple delete” scandal has satisfied the law, but British Columbians will need more convincing before they are satisfied the government puts public interest ahead of partisan considerations.
George Steven Gretes, 28, a former ministerial assistant in B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, pleaded guilty Thursday to making a false statement during an inquiry by then-privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham. He was fined $2,500.
Gretes was charged with lying under oath after telling Denham twice that he had not triple-deleted government emails. Denham’s office was conducting an inquiry sparked by a complaint from Tim Duncan, another Ministry of Transportation employee.
Duncan said he had been on the job for only a few weeks in November 2014, when the ministry received a request for records relating to the disappearance of women along northern B.C.’s Highway of Tears. He said he turned up more than a dozen relevant documents. He said Gretes told him to delete the records, then took away Duncan’s keyboard and deleted the emails, then triple-deleted the files to erase them completely.
Gretes wasn’t fined for expunging the emails — it wasn’t prohibited at the time — but for twice lying about doing so.
The fine is only part of his punishment — his misdeeds cost him his job and some hefty legal fees, and will likely be a handicap in his career.
As the provincial court judge pointed out, though, “there’s a public interest in all government employees being scrupulously honest.”
If we could be convinced Gretes acted alone, the conclusion of his court case would be more comforting, but there’s more than a nagging suspicion that his actions sprang from a culture, not from an impulse. His lawyer said Gretes lied because an older staff member had shown him how to triple-delete, and he didn’t want to get her into trouble.
The culture in an organization is generally established from the higher end of the chain of command, not among the lower ranks. It’s in the genetic makeup of a politically appointed aide to do what the boss would want. If those at the top clearly insist on consistently ethical behaviour aimed at the public good, those at the bottom are less likely to engage in “win at any cost” strategies.
It’s that wrong kind of culture that fosters such things as the “quick wins” scandal, the strategy that sought to exploit ethnic issues to win votes for the B.C. Liberals. It’s that mindset that motivated Nigel Wright and others in the Prime Minister’s Office of Stephen Harper to try to make the Mike Duffy living-expenses scandal go away.
Denham’s inquiry into the triple-deletions was expanded into a wider look at how government documents were handled. Her report said political staff in Premier Christy Clark’s office and in ministries were routinely destroying government records and violating the province’s access-to-information laws.
The government’s response was appropriate — former privacy commissioner David Loukidelis was hired to make recommendations on how to improve its freedom of information policies and procedures and records management practices. And Clark has agreed to implement Loukidelis’s wide-ranging recommendations.
But it will take more than policies and procedures to change a culture. That starts with those at the very top insisting, without equivocation, that standard operating procedure is to do the right thing, even if it’s not the politically expedient thing.
