On Thursday, my colleague Matthew Pearson and I weighed in on a story about whether Ottawa South Liberal candidate John Fraser was ever involved in the discussion surrounding the gas-plant cancellations in southern Ontario that will cost taxpayers almost $600 million.
Matthew’s news story is here (with all the twists and turns of the day), and my column, about how Premier Kathleen Wynne can’t shake the gas-plant scandal, even at the premiers’ conference, is here, in case you missed them.
Of the many confusing aspects of the story is how the Ministry of Government Services searched for emails, a search that led the government to identify 38 “back-up tapes” of emails with John Fraser’s name on them. Last night, after deadline, and MGS spokesperson sent this response:
The backup tapes were identified because they contain a snapshot of the individual’s email accounts named in the committee motion of June 25, 2013. These back-ups were taken at different points in time and go back to January 2010. An additional search using the keywords provided by the committee would be needed to determine if the records contain any information responsive to the committee motion.
We have asked the committee for direction on if they would like us to further search these tapes to determine if any of the records on them are responsive to the committee’s motion. At this time there is no evidence to suggest that any record on any backup tape is responsive to the committee motion.
Until June 2013 as per the Premier’s Office’s record retention protocol, emails were on a daily back-up schedule with a 2-week retention. Tapes were overwritten after the 2-week period. However, due to a major IT upgrade from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Microsoft Exchange 2010, 3 months of back-up tapes for the Premier’s Office were retained for recovery purposes in case of upgrade issues.
So it’s still a complicated story, but at first glance, there are a number of pertinent pieces of information, especially as they apply to Liberal candidate John Fraser. First is that it really does appear that the search of the backup tapes with John Fraser’s name on them were found by looking ONLY for John Fraser’s name. So those emails could be about anything.
And, of course, there’s the ministry staff’s statement that, “At this time there is no evidence to suggest that any record on any backup tape is responsive to the committee motion.”
