OTTAWA - The Mounties have decided not to lay charges in a case in which sensitive government emails were deliberately destroyed, ending a two-year probe regarded as an overdue test of Canada's information law.
The file, involving a nasty internal scrap at the National Gallery of Canada, was first referred to the Mounties by gallery officials in 2008.
And earlier this year, Canada's information watchdog alerted justice officials after her own investigation "found as a fact that records responsive to an access to information request were destroyed and individuals were counselled to destroy records."
The RCMP's review of the case focused on Section 67.1 of the Access to Information Act, which provides penalties of up to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine for destroying government records or even counselling someone to conceal them from a requester.
The section was added to the Act in 1999, after several high-profile cases in which military documents about Somalia, as well as Red Cross records, were shredded to prevent embarrassing public disclosures.
But in the 11 years since, no one has ever been convicted or even charged under the section -- and the RCMP probe was being watched closely to see whether the law was effective.
"We conducted an investigation and we concluded that no criminal charges will be laid," Sgt. Stephane Turgeon of the RCMP's "A" Division said in a brief statement. "That concludes the matter at our end."
Turgeon declined to provide further details on the investigation or the decision.
The National Gallery case marks the first time the office of the information commissioner has ever referred a file to the attorney general of Canada for possible prosecution under Section 67.1.
"We did find evidence of an offence having been committed," Suzanne Legault, the current commissioner, reported in March this year.
Her investigators do not conduct criminal investigations, and cannot make findings of criminal liability, but can alert justice officials who may then ask police to step in. Legault's office provided the attorney general's office only with a case summary, rather than any evidence.
The National Gallery dispute, which wound up in Federal Court, involved a senior official who was fired for deleting apparently embarrassing emails about an employee, but who was later reinstated.
Legault declined comment about the RCMP decision except to note that the 11-year-old provision remains "uncharted territory."
Her office is currently probing four complaints of alleged political interference in the processing of Access to Information Act requests, two of which involve Sebastien Togneri, a senior aide to cabinet minister Christian Paradis.
Sebastien resigned Sept. 30 after revelations he had meddled in at least four access requests, even though he testified before a House of Commons committee that he had done so only once.
In July last year, Togneri ordered Public Works officials to "unrelease" a document that was already on its way to The Canadian Press. A senior bureaucrat dashed to the mailroom to retrieve it, even though every authorized official in the department had signed off on its release to the news agency.
The document was a relatively innocuous annual report on the performance of the federal government's real-estate portfolio.
The Togneri incident sparked demands from opposition critics that justice officials should consider laying charges under Section 67.1, which the government rebuffed by saying Legault was still investigating.
A spokesman for the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, which also pressed for possible prosecution of Togneri under the section, called the Mountie decision in the National Gallery case "puzzling."
"How did this go from 'We find as a fact that records were destroyed' to 'Nothing to see here, let's all move along'?" Vincent Gogolek said in an interview from Vancouver.
"It's more than a little disappointing, and quite puzzling actually."
Gogolek said the decision seems inconsistent for a government that bills itself as tough on crime, including white-collar crime.
Section 67.1 was originally a private-member's bill proposed in 1998 by former Liberal MP Colleen Beaumier, who was determined to end the scandal of repeated document shredding by nervous public servants.
Now retired and living in Brampton, Ont., Beaumier said she was angry that the bad behaviour she was attempting to stamp out persists in government a decade later.
"When I see politicians and public servants getting away with this kind of deception, it makes me very angry," she said.
"This isn't the first RCMP investigation to have fizzled and until the people demand better from their elected officials they will get no better."
Beaumier noted that her private-member's bill to toughen the Act got little support from Prime Minister Jean Chretien at the time, but was backed by the Reform party under Preston Manning.
