Suspicious Deletions At CRA

While it may not qualify as a smoking gun, a series of text-message deletions at Canada Revenue Agency looks decidedly suspicious. Given what many see as the Agency's Harper-directed war against non-profits that are critical of government policy, there is ample reason to see foul play in the move.

Today's Star reports the following:

The Canada Revenue Agency has destroyed all text message records of its employees and has disabled logging of these messages in the future, the Star has learned.

Emails, released through access to information legislation, reveal that Shared Services Canada, the federal organization responsible for information technology services, destroyed the records in the middle of a business day in August.

The CRA has steadfastly denied that the audits are politically motivated, a denial that rings hollow given that no right-wing organization (The Fraser Institute, Macdonald-Laurier Institute, et al.) has been given such scrutiny, while even the most seemingly innocuous of entities, such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Naturalists have been harassed, apparently as reprisal against once having a guest speaker address the tar sands issue at one of their meetings.

The fact that the text messages were deleted during the day has raised eyebrows:

Srinivasan Keshav, a computer science professor at the University of Waterloo, said he was surprised that the government deleted records and disabled logging in the middle of the day, when there’s a risk of disrupting the service.

Shared Services Canada told the Star in a statement that it operated IT infrastructure, based on instructions from individual departments and agencies that are responsible for their own information management practices.

Perhaps whoever ordered the deletions was feeling some heat?

The matter has come to the attention of Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault:

“If the commissioner is satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to investigate this matter, she may initiate an investigation. Investigations under the Act are confidential,” Legault’s spokeswoman Natalie Hall told the Star.

Under the law, deleting messages for the purpose of restricting access to information is guilty of an indictable offence and could face up to two years in prison or a $10,000 fine.

While it is highly unlikely that this latest outrage against transparency will ever find its way into a court of law, I can only hope that, given the secretive and vindictive nature of the Harper regime, the court of public opinion will render an unequivocal verdict in 2015.