Government withholding records on Senate scandal, Liberals allege

OTTAWA – The federal access-to-information watchdog, already investigating complaints that the government’s central bureaucracy is withholding documents about the Senate scandal, is now being asked to widen its probe — again.

The request from the Liberals comes after months of the Privy Council Office saying it has no documents regarding Sen. Mike Duffy or the deal he struck over his housing expenses with Nigel Wright, the prime minister’s former chief of staff. The opposition parties are trying to find any kind of additional paper trail about that deal.

This week, the NDP pushed Prime Minister Stephen Harper on how much information was being blacked out from documents that have been publicly released. The Liberals started making similar complaints in the summer, and this month asked Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault to widen her office’s probe of the PCO for the second time.

Postmedia News has also filed complaints with over the PCO’s handling of access-to-information requests on the Senate spending affair.

The PCO has responded to multiple requests for documents by saying it either has none under its control — saying it’s a matter inside the Prime Minister’s Office, which isn’t subject to the Access to Information Act — or that the documents don’t exist.

In one case, Liberal MP Ralph Goodale asked for emails from former PMO legal adviser Benjamin Perrin, who court documents allege played a role in Wright’s deal with Duffy. The PCO told Goodale it didn’t have any of Perrin’s emails – weeks after telling the RCMP in December that it had archived Perrin’s email account after he left the PMO in April 2013.

“They’re non-answers – deliberate avoidance of the issue. You just get the blather kind of answer, which is process rather than substance,” Goodale said outside the House of Commons.

“It simply adds to the public’s frustration, adds to the public’s conviction that something very serious has gone wrong here and the public will keep wanting to have answers to their questions.”

On Tuesday, the government tabled to five written questions from opposition parties in the House of Commons, including two from the Liberals, about whether the PCO would renew searches for documents after misplacing Perrin’s emails, and one from the NDP about the Wright-Duffy deal. The government responded that PCO wasn’t involved, had no documents and had followed the access-to-information law.

jpress@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/jordan_press