Former privacy commissioner: Missing government emails may never be found

Former information and privacy commissioner Karen Rose says she doubts a legislative standing committee investigating missing government emails will ever figure out where they went.

Rose made the comments during a second straight day of hearings by a special legislative standing committeeinvestigating the missing emails as well as reviewing the government's record-keeping policies.

The committee was struck after Rose made a finding that the province's Archives and Records Act was violated when a swath of emails went missing from the account of a senior bureaucrat with Innovation PEI.

The missing emails, according to the two people who asked for them through multiple freedom of information requests, are related to the provincial government's e-gaming affair.

"I understand, only from reading the news, that your committee is looking at the issue of these missing emails but also at what systems and policies and procedures are in place now or could possibly be in place in the future to prevent this sort of thing from happening again," Rose told P.E.I. MLAs. "That, to my mind, is a very worthwhile focus because I doubt that you will find information that will let you know where these emails went."

'Distressed by the discovery'

The emails in question belong to Brad Mix, though he is not named in the commissioner's report.

According to a submission from government to the privacy commissioner, Mix "was distressed by the discovery of missing emails" and reached out to government's IT division to report the problem.

While Rose said there was "insufficient evidence" to conclude "that records were intentionally destroyed for the purpose of evading an access request," she also said, "the probability is small that the named employee's emails would accidentally go missing for precisely the period of time during which the e-gaming file was open."

Opposition leader Peter Bevan-Baker said he's not deterred by Rose's comments about the likelihood of getting to the bottom of where the missing emails went.

"I'm not about to throw up the white flag and to surrender that we're not going to find out what happened, but clearly it's not something that is going to come easily," Bevan-Baker said in an interview following the legislative standing committee on Thursday.

'Are we going to need a separate forensic investigation?'

Sidney MacEwen, a government member on the committee, said he believes the committee must continue to dig for answers.

"I think we can get to a point where we can confirm that someone went in and did this. Noware we going to need a separate forensic investigation?" MacEwen askedin an interview with CBC News.

MacEwen said he's not ruling that out.

But the committee wants to hear first hand from Brad Mix. They will be calling him to appear before the committee.

As well,the committee wants to go back even further, to shine a light on another batch of missing emails.

In 2016, P.E.I.'s auditor general reported that emails from accounts for three senior civil servants involved in the e-gaming affair had been deleted. At the time, the auditor general said there was no evidence the records had been intentionally deleted, but failure to properly archive them was a breach of the Archives and Records Act.

'Lack of due regard for transparency'

During the standing committee meeting on Thursday, the committee decided it wants to hear from former premier Robert Ghiz's chief of staff Chris LeClair and former deputy minister Melissa MacEachern.

Four years ago, in November 2016, the Liberal-dominated public accounts committee originally agreed and then backtracked on plans to call the two before a legislative standing committee which was looking into the e-gaming affair.

The province's failed bid to become a regulator of online gambling was the subject of a special investigation by Auditor General Jane MacAdam. She concluded government's pursuit of the plan "demonstrated a lack of due regard for transparency and accountability."

Bevan-Baker said not only is this new committee tasked with trying to get to the bottom of where the missing emails went, but it must also ensureprocedures are in place so this never happens again.

"I hope through all of the witnesses that we're bringing forward, not only will we hopefully shine a light on this dark hole of e-gaming but also that we will again just create this most robust framework that we possibly can."

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