Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard confirmed she had opened a probe into the Privy Council Office’s record keeping practices
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OTTAWA — Canada’s access to information watchdog is investigating if the top federal department broke the law when it failed to keep handwritten notes relating to the hiring of the former head of the so-called “green slush fund.”
In a letter to Conservative MP Kelly McCauley, Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard confirmed that she had opened a probe into the Privy Council Office’s (PCO) record keeping practices during selection committees for government appointments.
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In her brief note, Mayrand said she had advised PCO, which assists the prime minister’s office, that it “must keep all records relating to the allegation(s) until the investigation and any subsequent legal proceedings are complete.”
Last fall, McCauley filed a complaint to the information watchdog after a top PCO official told the public accounts committee that the department had not kept the handwritten notes of selection committee members who interviewed Annette Verschuren to be chair of the board of Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC).
SDTC, referred to as the “green slush fund” by Conservatives, was an embattled green tech fund that was dissolved after a scathing auditor general report last year revealed serious governance and conflict of interest issues.
In a separate report, the federal ethics commissioner found Verschuren had broken conflict of interest laws when she failed to recuse herself from funding decisions that impacted companies linked to accelerators for which she was also a director. Verschuren quit SDTC’s board of directors in Nov. 2023.
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During a testy public accounts committee meeting in October, Conservative MPs questioned a PCO executive in charge of senior personnel, Donnalyn McClymont, about the fact that a request by the committee for all documents relating to Verschuren’s appointment only produced a single advice document.
“We’ve provided all of the documents that we have. The advice letters are the final records that we keep of the deliberations of the selection committee and the advice provided to the minister. We do not maintain other documents,” said McClymont, PCO’s deputy secretary to the cabinet in charge of senior personnel and public service renewal.
She told MPs that handwritten notes that are used by the selection committee to formulate the final advice on a certain appointment candidate are considered “transitory” and are not kept.
“Ostensibly what you have are the minutes of the selection committee, the final formal document,” she told the committee. “We do between 30 and 60 processes a year. We interview between 5,000 and 10,000 people. We cannot, under the Privacy Act, hold that level of information on every single person from every single interview.”
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In an interview, McCauley said he was “appalled” and “disgusted” by McClymont’s admission that certain records produced by selection committee members are not maintained, so he complained to the Information Commissioner.
In his complaint, he accused PCO of breaching the section of the Access to Information Act that forbids officials from destroying, mutilating or altering a record “with intent to deny a right of access.”
“Here you have literally the deputy secretary to the cabinet openly telling us, no, they don’t follow the (Access to Information Act) unless it suits them,” he charged in an interview.
OIC spokesperson France Langlois declined to comment on the complaint, citing the section of the ATIA that prevents the commissioner from disclosing information about an investigation with unrelated parties.
She also said the OIC had updated its template email a few months ago to include the reminder that organizations must conserve all records related to the topic under investigation.
PCO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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