If my instincts are correct, filing Motions for “Summary Judgment” in the CMT lawsuit may go down in history as the stupidest thing a herd of panicked defendants has ever done!  Why?

Well, because the Supreme Court of Canada has set clear precedents in recent land-mark decisions that whenever a Motion seeking summary judgement is granted to defendants, they are obliged to provide the plaintiffs – in this case “Capital Markets Technology” (CMT) – with a complete “Affidavit of Documents” on the matter so they have fair access to justice and can – as the Supreme Court put it – “put their best foot forward” to prove the claims made in the pleadings they initially made in their  statement of claim against the defendants. Well, Supreme Court judge Gordon Campbell approved five (5) separate motions for summary judgment and mapped out a pretty tight timeline leading up to several days scheduled next April, 2019 when those summary judgment Motions will all be heard and decided.

And here’s the problem for the 16 defendants – who are now arranged into five different ‘groups’, each with its own lawyer and legal requirements to file an affidavit of documents: the defendants are almost certainly going to start throwing each other under the bus as they play the “blame game” in a frantic effort to save themselves.

The bus is already “en route” with this coming Friday – November 30th – being the deadline for filing those documents…with cross-examination of witnesses scheduled for January, 2019.

Here’s what I think is going to happen:

1. Some of the defendants won’t file their documents claiming they were lost or destroyed or – like Paul Jenkins has already claimed – his computer was “hacked” and some anonymous force out to destroy e-gaming records in an obscure individual’s hard drive somehow succeeded [Question: “how do you get your cloud-based gmail or hotmail or whatevermail files “deleted” when your computer is hacked?]
2.  Some of the defendants will claim that documents don’t have to be produced because they are protected by “Solicitor-Client” privilege, even where both the parties involved (sender and receiver) aren’t even lawyers.
3. Some of the defendants will pretend that no records exist on certain matters relating to e-gaming because the things the plaintiff claimed happened never happened.

The mandatory production of records deadline is always a watershed moment in a law-suit.  It’s when the “rubber hits the road” so to speak, and if you’ve claimed things happened that didn’t happen, or denied things happened that really did happen – the historical record of what ACTUALLY happened will expose any false claims made in the initial pleadings by the defendants as convenient fiction (aka “lies”).

I suspect the defendants never dreamed that CMT would have somehow been able to find the means to pony up a million dollars in security costs, or afford the legal costs required to advance the case to this stage…..but it somehow did, and here we are….Tick-Tock….Tick-Tock….

I’m especially looking forward to getting copies of the filed documents to dig a little deeper into the claims made by the defendants that fall under excuse #3 – that certain records “don’t exist” because things didn’t happen – because I’ve already anticipated that one to be false on a number of fronts, and I’m now on the verge of blowing those lies out of the water as I start receiving stacks of e-gaming documents from about a dozen different access to information requests I filed a couple of months ago.

The PEI government’s group of defendants – with Jonathan Coady as their legal counsel – has clearly created a major problem for themselves by making outrageous claims in the initial pleadings saying all kinds of ridiculous things, like they had no knowledge of the Loyalty Card Program. As I’ve already explained in a recent article, my access request on that one – although I’ve yet to receive the documents – confirmed that there are at least 207 pages of  Loyalty Card Program government documents.  So will Jonathan Coady now produce those Loyalty Card Program records on Friday? Or will he attempt to maintain the fiction that the government has no knowledge of the program to the court?

And here’s another prediction I’ll put money on: What the PEI government lawyer “Billy Dow” (affectionately known as “pops” by Liberal insiders) told Globe and Mail reporter Robin Doolittle [as well as the PEI Law Society when Michael Redmond filed a complaint alleging Dow was engaged in a conflict of interest] was that he wasn’t in a “conflict of interest” when he bought shares in Capital Markets Technology and then later reviewed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which the PEI government drew up with Trinity Bay Technologies (TBT) -TBT being a 100%-owned subsidiary of CMT- because he didn’t know that TBT was a subsidiary of CMT at the time. Really? The government’s lawyer does a legal review of a binding, exclusive contract with a company and he doesn’t know anything about the company? C’mon!

I think the documents – if they are released by one or more of the defendants, which I believe they will be – will show that he most certainly knew that TBT was owned by CMT, and was indeed aware of his conflict of interest as was Premier MacLauchlan.

Why do I think that? Because Gary Scales – a McInnis Cooper lawyer – left the group of government defendants a while back and got his own lawyer,  and will likely have no reason not to disclose documents that shift the focus from him and his law firm to Dow and the government – like I said – it’s going to be a bumpy ride for them all as “…the wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round…” on the e-gaming bus!

And perhaps more shocking than the complete unravelling of the defendant’s respective “defences” will be the revelation that the Premier  – who promised to “do things differently” – will finally be exposed as the Premier who systematically misled the Legislative Assembly time and time again in an attempt to execute an official cover-up of the entire e-gaming scandal.

Listen to the Premier’s December 15, 2016 response to Jamie Fox’s questioning about Billy Dow’s purported e-gaming “conflict of interest”  – I suspect Billy Dow is likely to be thrown under the bus at some point, but I’d wager it won’t be by Jamie Fox as the Premier suggests in this video!