PREAMBLE

Cabinet Minister Matthew MacKay has an incredibly important job in the King government as Minister of Economic Growth, Tourism and Culture [EGTC]: he sits on top of a LOT of big “money files”.   

He also took strong stands with the rest of his PC team on the illegal deletion of egaming records, the lack of transparency and refusal to release records by the government, and the need for strong penalties for those who delete government records in contravention of the Public Archives and Records Act.

Let’s see how he’s faired with those principled positions since becoming top dog at EGTC.

ON THE GOVERNMENT’S REFUSAL TO RELEASE RECORDS ON DELETED FILES

ON THE CONSEQUENCES FOR DELETING GOVERNMENT RECORDS

When in Opposition, MacKay called for the resignation of Neil Stewart for the destruction of Melissa MacEachern’s egaming records with the rest of his PC caucus.

He spoke to the scandalous refusal of the MacLauchlan Liberals to release documents related to the deletion of egaming records by Robert Ghiz (Chris LeClair) and Neil Stewart (Melissa MacEachern, now “Melissa James”).

Here’s an interesting clip of Matthew as an Opposition MLA expressing his concerns about the need for appropriate consequences for deleting government records:

Let’s look at what MacKay said in print:

Mr. MacKay: Right. In my opinion, and this is just my own personal opinion, $10,000 is – it should be a lot harsher fine of some sort. If a public servant or somebody from government went in and deliberately destroyed a public document, they should no longer have a job. They should no longer have a pension. There should be – up to $10,000 is not near harsh enough with the word ‘intent.’

FLASH FORWARD TO TODAY

Neil Stewart – that guy MacKay wanted fired when in opposition –  is now drawing a “deputy-level” salary as a senior official in MacKay’s Department. He continues to hold his preferential position of insider influence he’s held for 20 years under successive governments, despite being at the centre of three major scandals [Ocean Choice; PNP; and Egaming].

What happened to the “should no longer have a job. They should no longer have a pension” Minister MacKay?

More egregious still is how Minister MacKay continues to protect Brad Mix, despite it being proven that he destroyed two years of egaming records (deliberately), which should have resulted in criminal charges, but has been completely ignored.

Ed Malone, a senior official with ITSS, told the Special Committee on Records that there were only two possibilities to explain those 2 years of deleted emails in Brad Mix’s account:  either Brad Mix is responsible, or someone from ITTS is responsible.

He explained that there is no logged entry by any ITTS exists on record, so that leaves only one possibility:  Brad Mix is responsible for the deletion of his records!

You would think this would matter eh, but apparently not?  All of this information was captured and published in an article by the CBC:

“John Brennan, the province’s director of business infrastructure services, told members of the Special Committee on Government Records Retention that there are only two possible ways a swath of emails from Brad Mix, a senior civil servant in government’s economic development branch, could have gone missing. “They were deleted … or they were archived to a location off the network that we didn’t have visibility to,” Brennan said, in response to a question from PC MLA Sidney MacEwen. In either case, Brennan said the only people who could have performed the operation would have been the specific user whose email account is involved — in this case, Mix — or someone Mix had personally provided with proxy access to his email account. Brennan said there would have been a record if someone in government’s IT division had been involved, but no such record exists.”

Brad hasn’t missed a day of work as a result of that under Matthew MacKay, and remains THE ONE PERSON responsible for recruiting companies to PEI.

As for MacKay’s promise to leave no rock unturned to get to the bottom of where those Brad Mix emails went….this is what he said after Karen Rose’s Brad Mix Order was released revealing how the government had misled both Paul Maines and me by hiding the fact of those missing records.

How’d that turn out?

Nuff said!