Deceit and Delete: Cataloguing the BC Government’s Sketchy Email Habits

BC Premier Christy Clark does not particularly care what you think about her staff's unusual (and potentially criminal) email habits.

That's the signal she sent out last week when her BC Liberal party announced it has rehired former staffer Laura Miller as executive director, even as she faces criminal charges for destruction of government records (read: deleting emails) in Ontario. "It's the fair and right approach—one that respects our court process, including the fundamental principle that every person is innocent unless proven otherwise," Premier Clark said in a statement. "We all know Laura for her hard work and her integrity. Her return means she can continue to make an outstanding contribution to our party." Since October last year, British Columbia's email and record collection practices have been under a ton of scrutiny because of an information and privacy commissioner report that found employees in multiple ministries deleted emails that should be captured by freedom-of-information law. Government workers that cooperated with the investigation claimed emails were merely "transitory" and not relevant to FOI inquiries. Daily declutter practices included deleting all sent emails at the end of each day. But commissioner Elizabeth Denham ruled those excessive deleting efforts break the law. Though the premier has since promised a more "open government" (a promise she's been repeating since 2011) recent revelations and charges have only drawn more attention to politicians and staffers' unconventional relationship with their inboxes. For example, British Columbia's Finance Minister Mike de Jong recently declared he doesn't "participate" in email. Earlier this month he claimed he "just never got into it." "Minister de Jong has the longstanding practice of requiring information such as briefing notes, decision notes, memos and other correspondence to be delivered to him through his office on paper," reads an emailed statement to media. (Imagine for a moment the poor soul who had to print off and/or read aloud this sentence to de Jong for approval.) "His choice not to receive information or hold conversations by email is a matter of personal preference as a way to manage and prioritize the volume of information his portfolio already entails." Premier Clark could have presumably called for better record keeping at this point, but instead stood behind her finance minister's "personal preference." "Some people are more comfortable with modern technology than others," Premier Clark told The Province at the time. "Mike is a farmer. And I know that some farmers use email, I know that some don't. And he is one of them." Despite attempts to frame de Jong as a blameless luddite, transparency experts have repeatedly said this is part of a pattern that puts government secrecy above the law. Denham's report found that staffers went to improbable lengths not to create publicly-accessible records. When FOI requests came in, staff tracked names on disposable post-it notes, and asked other staffers for records face-to-face. With so little in writing, BC makes it really tough to find out how and why the government makes decisions. You can see those habits in action in the case of George Gretes, former ministerial assistant in the transportation ministry, now charged with giving false testimony in an attempt to mislead the information and privacy commissioner. Gretes resigned last fall; his charges have not yet been tested in court. Gretes's email deleting story begins with an information request that came through transportation ministry in 2014 but resulted in "no responsive records." Former staffer Tim Duncan filed a complaint alleging Gretes deleted over a dozen relevant emails from his computer, and told him: "It's done, now you don't have to worry about it anymore." Gretes first denied deleting the emails, but later changed his story. Opposition NDP Leader John Horgan has also claimed delete-happy staffers extend to BC's LNG and health ministries. "We asked for emails from the Premier's office and got none, then discovered more than a hundred existed and disappeared," Horgan said in a blog post. "We asked for emails from the LNG ministry and got exactly three. Then we found out 800 existed and, again, disappeared." Then there's Michele Cadario, Clark's former deputy chief of staff, who admitted to have deleted every single sent email at the end of each workday. Denham found her interpretation of the law resulted in lost records, and broke provincial information and privacy law. We all know it takes time to kick a habit, even a legally problematic one. But with the premier's latest statements and actions on this file, it's possible she "just never got into" this transparency thing in the first place. Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.