The Legislature Raids

The destruction of thousands of government e-mails in the B.C. Rail scandal is astonishing and disturbing, especially when you consider the Liberals' years of assurances about the integrity of the investigation and the need to preserve evidence.

Immediately after the cops raided the legislature in 2003 it was Premier Gordon Campbell himself who said no stone must be left unturned in the search for truth and accountability.

"There is an ongoing investigation and I've told everyone to be as open and transparent as they can about the entire situation," Campbell said, while calling for a "thorough, complete and diligent investigation in the public interest." Job 1 of any thorough investigation is the preservation of evidence. But now Campbell is the same guy shrugging off the disappearance of thousands of e-mails with a lame "we followed the law" excuse.

If that's true, then the law is an ass. The government's own rules on the preservation of e-mail records is shot through with loopholes, allowing politicians and bureaucrats to permanently delete e-mails that are "temporary" or "transitory" in nature, whatever that means.

It's precisely because those vague terms are so wide open to interpretation that the law contains specific overrides, requiring the government to preserve records that have "legal" or "evidentiary" value.

So did the government really follow its own laws when it vaporized thousands of e-mails? You can bet a gaggle of lawyers -- all working on your dime -- will now have a grand old time arguing the point in court.

But it gets more pathetic than that: It was only a few weeks before the cops raided the legislature that Campbell's own top deputy was caught deleting e-mails to prevent their release to the public.

"I delete the stuff all the time as fast as I can," Ken Dobell admitted back then, earning himself a tongue-lashing from the province's freedom of information commissioner and a promise from the government that e-mails would not be destroyed.

"E-mails are documents of record and they should be treated accordingly," cabinet minister Sandy Santori scolded Dobell.

"It's a concern to me that he may not have had the knowledge in terms of what his responsibility was with respect to those documents." Santori subsequently resigned from the Campbell cabinet -- while Campbell put Dobell in charge of reviewing evidence in the B.C. Rail investigation before it was released to the police! Sadly, there are probably people in Victoria smiling from ear to ear about all this.

Despite Campbell's lofty talk about openness and transparency and a diligent quest for justice, the government secretly hopes this whole ugly corruption case goes off the rails and never makes it to court.

Whoever pushed the delete button on all those e-mails brought that possibility one step closer to reality -- and insulted all British Columbians, who deserve to know the truth about the B.C. Rail scandal.

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

Suggestion: look up Michael Smyth's column in The Province today, and leave a comment. I did. I said thanks to Michael, and invited him to join us in our efforts to stop further BCRail giveaways on or before "BC Rail Day". Meantime, I thought it might be helpful to dig into the Archives here, and reprint the statement from "Three Concerned Canadians" who realized that the Campbell Gang had ample time ... before the police raided the Legislature ... to interfere with the BC Rail evidence.

- BC Mary.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

# posted by BC Mary @ 9:06 a.m.