Premier's office performs duties "orally"

[flamingfingers]

Vaughn Palmer:

Vaughn Palmer: Time for a deeper look into why Premier Christy Clark’s office has no records to produce

By Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun columnist March 5, 2013 6:07 PM

Kim Haakstad, former deputy chief of staff to Premier Christy Clark, explained to investigators in February why the premier’s office had no records to produce about the departure of the premier’s former chief of staff Ken Boessenkool.

VICTORIA — Earlier this year, information watchdog Elizabeth Denham set out to investigate whether the government really had “no records” regarding the departure of the premier’s chief of staff, Ken Boessenkool.

Boessenkool resigned in September after a two-week investigation by the head of the government personnel agency into his conduct with a female staffer in an incident in a Victoria bar.

Given the potential for legal action, it seemed unlikely that such a sensitive matter would have been conducted without anyone keeping a documentary record.

Nevertheless, when reporter Jonathan Fowlie of The Vancouver Sun filed a request under provincial access to information legislation, the Liberals claimed to have no records of any kind, paper or electronic.

Fowlie then probed further by filing a complaint to Information and Privacy Commissioner Denham. Her office was already in the midst of an inquiry into the growing number of cases where the government claimed “no records” in response to information requests, particularly from the news media.

Fowlie’s complaint dovetailed with that work, because many of those non-responses originated with the premier’s office. Denham expanded on her inquiry to include the Boessenkool case.

That led to a sit-down interview in early February between Denham’s investigators and Kim Haakstad, then deputy chief of staff to Premier Christy Clark and not yet the household name she would become after she was forced to resign over the government’s toxic ethnic outreach strategy.

Haakstad proceeded to justify the lack of written record on the Boessenkool departure by insisting that was standard operating procedure.

“The general practice within the office of the premier is to communicate verbally in person,” she told investigators, according to the information commissioner’s report on that and other matters released Monday.

“Email communications usually consist of requests to make telephone calls or meet in person. Generally, staff members in the office of the premier do not make substantive communication relating to business matters via email.”

Even where they do resort to electronic communication, “most of the emails are transitory in nature and are deleted once a permanent record, such as a calendar entry, is created.”

Did the deputy chief of staff have any email exchange with Boessenkool on this matter? “Ms. Haakstad believes that there would have been email communications between her and the former chief of staff during the relevant period, but these emails would have been transitory in nature and were deleted before the access request was received.”

As to what constitutes “transitory” communications, those were said to include missives of “temporary usefulness” such as: “Drafts. Phone messages. A meeting request. Copy of an incoming letter to the premier. Only required for a limited time or for preparation for an ongoing record. Not required to meet statutory obligations or to sustain administrative functions.”

“In general, the office of the premier possesses very little non-transitory information, particularly email,” the investigators were assured: “The office of the premier is a small public body whose functions are administrative in nature. It does not deliver programs, develop legislation or write briefing notes. Therefore, it does not create most of the categories of records that ministries create.”

So, to recap: Nothing of a substantive nature gets written down in the premier’s office in the first place. Business is conducted orally and in person. Email is used only for minor matters and those are sent to the electronic dumpster straightaway.

Such was the story told by Haakstad to the investigators on Feb. 6. Now contrast that with the way of doing business in the premier’s office that was on display three weeks later, when the New Democrats tabled the multicultural strategy.

The 17-page strategy was distributed by Haakstad herself to a number of government insiders via email. It laid out how public servants and Liberal political staff should work together to reach out to various ethnic communities, then bend those efforts to boost the re-election chances of the Liberal party.

In short, it was a detailed and ambitious set of marching orders on a major matter of public policy — precisely the sort of thing that was supposedly never produced in written form in the premier’s office, according to what the investigators were told by Clark’s official representative.

But the strategy does exist, along with a covering note that explains how the inner circle tried to escape public scrutiny for their efforts on behalf of the premier and party. It was distributed outside the government email server via a network of personal accounts maintained by everyone on the premier’s distribution list.

The practice of using personal emails for surreptitious public policy-making has occasionally been revealed through earlier leaks. But the ethnic outreach emails provide the most extensive documentation of the practice in a case linked directly to the office of the premier. They also directly contradict the “nothing in writing” assurances provided by Clark’s office just weeks before the leak.

One can only hope Denham seizes this opportunity to reopen her investigation, this time focusing on the use and abuse of the back channel as a way of making public policy while avoiding public scrutiny.

[email protected]
vancouversun.com

[samsquench07]

Christie Clarke should just resign, and end her political death. She was never voted in, in the first place, so it would be very appropriate to beat it.

[Urbane]

Christie Clarke should just resign, and end her political death. She was never voted in, in the first place, so it would be very appropriate to beat it.

Oh great. Earlier I had to refute the erroneous statement that during the 2009 election campaign the Liberals said they would not bring in the HST and now I have to prove that Christy Clark won the leadership of her party and the subsequent by-election. Premiers are never elected by the full electorate - only within their riding. That's the way our system works so if Dix had to resign early in his tenure as Premier, if he wins the May election, I wouldn't expect another general election to be called right away.

[Smurf]

You are right Urbane but you also have to admit that on that same basis the Liberal party and her riding made the decission for the whole province. The story might have been completely different had there actually been election. The rest of the province might have rejected her and her party. Therefore she was never truly elected by the people of the province only the Liberal party and her riding. Her real election is soon to come. We'll see how she does when all the provinces voters have a say.

[steven lloyd]

Her real election is soon to come. We'll see how she does when all the provinces voters have a say.

Meanwhile, in Liberal country ...

http://www.castanet.net/edition/news-st ... .htm#88365

[LANDM]

Off topic/Trip

[flamingfingers]

Christy and the "Dobell Doctrine":

Wednesday, March 06, 2013
This Day In Snookland...An Explanation For 'Oral Government' Emerges.
Ooooooooooeeww
What'sThatSmell?Ville


And, in my opinion, that reason really, really, really stinks.

Below is a written (i.e. not oral) statement from the Deputy Minister for Citizen Services and Open Government, Ms. Kim Henderson, responding to Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham's concerns about the fact that no one in the Premier's office ever writes anything down or ever uses their official government Email accounts for anything official:

"...I recognize that you were unable to find a single explanation for this trend of increasing “no responsive records” which is consistent with our own analysis. We too believe that the processing of multiple requests to ministries is a significant factor. For the increasing number of no records responses to the Office of the Premier, I would point out the Office of the Premier has had a dramatic increase in the number of requests overall and, has had an almost 200 per cent increase in the number of requests resulting in responsive records since 2009/10..."


You can find Ms. Henderson's entire letter to the Information Commissioner (which is copied to Ms. Lynda Tarras who produced no written records herself when she carried out the Boessenkool investigation) .....here.

****

Now.

I don't know about you, but I cannot believe this codswallop.

The offered explanation, from a BC Liberal Party Government Deputy Minister to the freaking Information Commissioner, is that nothing is written down because it would be just too much work if, as a result, somebody might actually ask to see it.

Which is complete and utter *bleep*.

Not to mention completely and utterly ridiculous given what WE NOW KNOW was being passed around by these people, secretly, using non-governmental Email communication (which means it WAS written down and being hidden from FOI requests).

Regardless...

Let's just consider the logic here for a moment shall we?

If someone submits an FOI request and they get nothing....

Well, if that person is tenacious, and really wants to find out what is going on, are they not then going to submit more FOI requests trying to find the information they are looking for?

And, if that wasthe case wouldn't FOI requests go up as a result?

In other words, could not a reasonable and logical case be made that one of the reasons that FOI requests to the Premier's Office have increased significantly since the advent of Snooklandia (i.e. post 2010) is precisely because...

...No one is writing anything down.
****


These people really must go now.

All of them.

I mean, the fact that the letter excerpted above was cc'd to Ms. Lynda Tarras with an explanation that is so blatantly obfuscatory really and totally is the last straw.

Read the comments here:

http://pacificgazette.blogspot.ca/