BC Supreme Court today heard that there may be "no explanation" for four years of missing BC Liberal cabinet ministers' emails relating to the $1 billion privatization of BC Rail - emails lawyers for three former provincial government aides facing corruption charges say may be vital to their defence.
It was reported this week that emails the defence filed an application for in June 2007 to obtain as potential evidence have either been erased or disappeared, causing a furor with both lawyers for the accused and the NDP opposition.
"There may be no explanation. No filing system is perfect," said BC government lawyer George Copley told Justice Elizabeth Bennett today.
The Vancouver Sun's Neal Hall reports today that Copley said questionnaires have been sent to nine people who have searched the files and, once their answers are returned, "we will file nine separate affidavits" to try to answer some of the questions posed by the defence lawyers.
Unfortunately I was not able to be in court today but Neal's full story is available online at the Vancouver Sun.
Hall also reports that the court heard more speculation about a possible BC cabinet leak to lobbyists Erik Bornmann and Brian Kieran - who were retained by BC Rail bidder OmniTRAX and are alleged to have provided bribes to former ministerial aides David Basi and Bob Virk.
Virk's lawyer Kevin McCullough told Bennett that police asked Bornmann if he had a source in cabinet - the answery was no, Hall reported.
But Bornmann mentioned that he had conversations with then deputy premier Christy Clark because Bornmann was a friend of Clark's husband, Mark Marissen, he added.
The hearing has been adjourned till Tuesday June 30.
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17 comments:
would the public affairs bureau know where they are.?
Some folks are either very stupid or think they are very smart. Do we really believe all those emails were destroyed? Ask anyone who does FOI work and they will mention the years such stuff is kept. So who is trying to snow us? The judge will end up with ulcers after listening to this pile of BS.
So Bill…an obvious question for the Premier:
Yesterday, how could you have claimed in all honesty that: "The records that should be kept under the law have been kept" when today, your lawyer George Copley informed the Court that: "There may be no explanation. No filing system is perfect"?
If he is fulfilling his legal responsibility, Mr. Copley must send “questionnaires” to the Premier and to Laura Dauphinee!
Bill:
For your readers who are too young to remember Watergate, they should understand that the Rose Mary Woods “disappearing” tapes incident occurred early on in President Nixon’s 2nd term and it was, “the beginning of the end”.
This court case is toast, the judge is going to declare a mistrial and it will all blow away.
Basi and Virk will sue everyone connected and there will be a massive financial settlement to keep them quiet.
It's over, Campbell and the Liberal Party of BC and Canada are immune from the law.
Will the public care? Nada. In Iran, people are dying over the same sort of crap, but not in the "Best place in the world", as we don't have the moral fortitude to face up to dictators and fight for freedom.
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" Benjamin Franklin
The Evil Eye
Defence alleges: 'Campbell controlled BC Rail deal'
"Premier Gordon Campbell was allegedly in direct control of the BC Rail deal that is central to a corruption case involving charges against three former government employees, the Supreme Court of British Columbia has been told.
Defence lawyer Kevin McCullough, who is arguing high-level cabinet e-mails are relevant to the case, made the allegation after reading in court yesterday a series of electronic notes exchanged between top officials in the Premier's office and one of the accused, Bob Virk."
Mark Hume - Globe & Mail
Maybe the e-mails were stolen by the FBI? Just like when a warehouse that was broken into a couple of years ago,that stored files of BC medical records and social servies files.The warehouse is owned by an American co.?
Recall fat ass coleman said, 'no reason to fear a breach of security???(para phrased).I'm praying that this is going to blow up, all that BS that the BCLiars have been feeding us.
Even if the e-mails were stolen,they can't be used in court. My guess is that they were distroyed to prevent the truth from coming out!
BT OFFICE WAS RENSACKED ALSO RE 1102 AM
RE:6:17,
as well the office of former AG,Geoff Plant!???
Document Disposal Act says:
"The Public Documents Committee established under the Document Disposal Act (RSBC 1996, c. 99, s. 3(1)) is comprised of the Provincial Archivist representing the Royal British Columbia Museum (Chair), the Comptroller General, and up to three other persons appointed by order in council."
I'm surprised that the Royal British Columbia Museum hasn't been approached for document or the Provincial Archivist.
Well, CKNW's newsroom assured me they weren't mentioning the Clark connection because its "just something that was said in court, its not proven" and that C. Clark being in their employ had no bearing whatsoever.
So that's all right then, right?
Are there two Progressive Groups of companies?
One founded and owned by Milan Ilich, brother-in-law to former Cabinet Minister Olga Ilich;
The other owned by Patrick Kinsella;
Or is Mr. Kinsella the President of Progressive Holdings and the Chairman of The Progressive Group which in turn is owned by .......Milan Ilich?
Trying to reconstruct what happened here: The Sun article reported clarification from George Copley that the government only had a manual archiving method for emails - printing them off and storing them in boxes. The Globe article of the 24th had implied that the archive was electronic. In fact, the Electronic Mail Schedule 102903 that you include in your earlier posting confirms this.
I think it would be fair to assume that this archive is included in the 4500 boxes.
However, the Globe also mentioned that the “In an application filed two weeks ago defence lawyers sought the disclosure of the e-mail records of several members of cabinet, key executives, and of Premier Gordon Campbell, from June, 2001 to 2005"
Your posting from two years ago stated that the defence had requested emails and other documents. Sounds like the government handed over copies of the paper archives and that it has taken the defence two years to compare that to emails from other sources and they came back 2 weeks ago for additional emails that were not in the paper archive. So, to infer that they deliberately erased data like Rose Marie Woods is unfair.
Mr. Copley says that they only have disaster recovery (DR) backups for the email system and these only go back 13 months. I once was a system administrator for the key back office system for a major western Canadian company and the business was surprised to learn that I could not use the recovery system to do much more than recover the system to the point just before the disaster. The main reason for going back 13 months is for redundancy - if one full backup is bad, go to the one before and roll forward.
That’s why they had the manual archival system in place.
Electronic archiving systems are not cheap or easy to implement. You need specialized media and you need to think about designs for retrieval of the information. IT managers never get promotions from implementing good archives - the payback is too far in the future. Email archiving may be a more generic issue, but I don’t think vendors were selling email archiving systems in 2001 and I am not sure they were mature by 2005. When I retired in 2006, my colleagues were still thinking about which one to buy.
Most IT departments I know of imposed limits on central storage of emails. I periodically burned backups for my Pearl Harbour file on CDs and then would delete them from my server account.
Bill, why don’t you ask your comrades in Saskatchewan and Manitoba what they implemented during the same time period for email archiving? Then Mr. Krog could advocate email archiving with some solid estimated costs and a few more design details.
It might be worth it for the historians. So much of our current historical record are emails and web pages that live in the moment. What is going to be there in 20 or even 10 years for future historians to look back at? I’m sure professional archivists are already wrestling with this one - it would be nice if one were to respond to these comments.
Over at BC Mary's, there's a link to a Court case which has Progressive Group being owned by Milan Ilich.
http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/sc/07/09/2007bcsc0938.htm
"The Evidence
[7] The parties do not dispute the facts. Mr. Ron Marr, a land development manager for the Progressive Group of companies, testified for the plaintiff. Mr. Milan Ilich is the founder and sole owner of the Progressive Group of companies...." SNIP
Milan Ilich??????
Isn't Patrick Kinsella the owner of the Progressive Group?
June 28, 2009 12:18 PM"
Which Progressive Group of companies did the work for BC Rail in their Core Review AND how many companies are called Progressive Group in BC?
If you check out Election BC's record on donations to the BC Liberal party you'ii find that there are TWO individuals making payments from their companies called "Progressive", Progressive Holdings and Progressive Group.
Are they one and the same?
Is Pat Kinsella the fall guy?
It's a pity Frank Magazine still isn't in print....they'd be having a field day with all of this.....
Re Anonymous 6:04
It's curious isn't it, that a lawsuit involving BC Rail, CN Rail and a company which consulted apparently for both of them is before the courts, but the major media has totally ignored it? Not just CanWest, which is to be expected, but also the publicly-owned CBC. Of course they are too busy fielding feel-good stories about what a great country Canada is, how lucky Canadians are, how special disabled, First Nations and visible minorities are, and what a great political system we have. And aping the CanWest content about drug crime, fires, great new things in real estate, and sexcrime.
How much else is in the courts that the public should know about, while the media are talking about celebrity death/clothing, distant air crashes, and the Toronto garbage strike?
If Patrick Kinsella really is the fall guy and his head is gonna roll, then it casts an ugly light on the 2001 and 2005 election campaigns, which he was in charge of. As in my post in the other thread, if Kinsella is the fall guy, the man whose election he oversaw/engineered should resign as a consequence, even if he can somehow prove his own innocence....
...If the RCMP would ever actually investigate, that is, and had filed the appropriate charges on higher-ups instead of just the trained-monkey ministerial aides. Instead of giving elected officials a "get ouf of jail free" card by not investigating them.
Re the Ilich case, and CN's own suit - it seems that not only did "we" give the store away for free, we're also being sued for not giving away enough of it and/or not paying for the privilege.
And Deep Throat's right - among the emails demanded should be those from the government and personal accounts of the Premier's Executive Assistant and Deputy Chief os Staff (Lara Dauphinee).
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