PREAMBLE

In the newly-filed lawsuit against Premier King et. al., the core of the lawsuit is focussed around the use of private emails to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosure.  The following is from my letter to the Commissioner:

On September 17, 2021, Premier King swore an affidavit within hours of receiving the Notice of Motion, even before a Statement of Claim had been filed by the Plaintiffs.

Paragraph 4 of Mr. King’s Affidavit reads:

“I never received the email that is alleged to have been sent by Allan Campbell on May 20, 2021 to dennis@peipc.ca. “

On September 24, 2021, the CBC interviewed Premier King, and reported in an article titled, “‘I don’t know where all this is coming from,’ King says of e-gaming allegations | CBC News,” the following claim made by Premier King:

“I’ve never used a Progressive Conservative email, I’ve never had access to that email — that’s an email that we use to blast out to the party, it’s not something that I’ve ever had to sign-in or ever used,” 

If the email from Allan Campbell that was  filed in the PEI Supreme Court is not real or accurate, then Mr. Paul Maines and his legal team have a lot of explaining to do, and will be held accountable by a Judge, as they should be.

On the other hand, if Premier King is not telling the truth, he will have a lot of explaining to do, and should resign immediately.

Bottomline: Someone is telling the truth; and someone is lying – the sooner all Islanders find out which is which, the better off everyone will be. 

The Premier could clear this matter up very easily – all he would need to do is to ask the Information Commissioner to go through the Dennis@peipc.ca email account to verify for Islanders his claim that it is only used for blasts to members. 

In the event that Premier King hasn’t made such a request to the Information Commissioner, I decided to take that upon myself. Below is the letter I sent to her yesterday.

Re: Rustico/Gamesys Prep dennis@peipc.ca

Dear Commissioner Doiron,

I was recently made aware of an email sent to Premier King’s PC Party email address dennis@peipc.ca. dated May 20, 2021 (attached) concerning plans for various individuals to meet to discuss a proposal for an online gaming project, with a company named “Gamesys”. This is the same email address from the PC Party website https://www.peipc.ca/provincial_executive that provides Premier King’s contact information.

I have also reviewed a sworn affidavit from a Private Investigator, Derrick Snowdy, as part of a filing in the Supreme Court of PEI against Mr. King initiated by Paul Maines, President of Capital Markets Technologies (CMT).

Mr. Snowdy’s Affidavit claims that he (Snowdy) was informed, by a whistle-blower, that Premier King was using his PC Party email account with this new gaming initiative. Premier King allegedly instructed the other participants in that business initiative to only use his PC Party email addres, for the express purpose of avoiding the production of any records that would be responsive to a gaming FOI request, particularly such FOIs submitted by ME or CMT President, Paul Maines.

This letter is seeking a priority investigation into this matter by your office.

BACKGROUND

I have been engaged in a comprehensive investigation into e-gaming since 2016. I have filed multiple FOI requests seeking egaming records, a number of which being reviewed by your office, resulting in Orders. There remain a number of active FOI reviews of mine with you,with Orders pending, but apparently not until the Spring of 2022, according to information I just received from your office a few days ago.

These previous investigations by the OIPC [by you, as well as your predecessor, Karen Rose] provide substantial evidence revealing a pattern of both “deception” and “deletion” of important government records by successive PEI governments, in multiple departments, especially related to the release of official government egaming records.

Records responsive to specific requests that I have submitted have not been provided; there have repeated breaches of the law; and a persistent refusal to abide by the findings of investigations by your office, and the dictates of your Orders, especially to provide honest disclosure regarding the status of responsive FOI records, especially by providing information that records, when they are found to have been deleted were once in the possession of government, but are no longer, with an explanation as to why that is the case.

In particular, it has repeatedly been determined by the OIPC in reviews of FOIs seeking gaming records that:

1. information about deleted egaming records was purposefully kept from me, despite a legal obligation to provide that information about the status of responsive records to my FOIs, and;

2. egaming records have been deleted, in multiple accounts, of numerous people who were involved in egaming during the same 2010-12 period, and there has not yet been an investigation into that matter, by anyone. At no time, in any of my FOIs seeking egaming records, was I ever informed about those missing records, which government is legally required to do under section 8.1, an important provision of the Act which compels the government to be helpful and honest with FOI applicants.

    

Despite critically-important government egaming records repeatedly having been kept from the eyes of me, and in some instances, the Information Commissioner as well, little by little, bits and pieces of information have gotten to me, some revealing the breadth of the deception and cover-up at play with the government’s manipulative release of information and non-disclosure of egaming records.

One such instance was an obscure reference to “FMT” [FMT is a 100%-owned subsidiary of CMT, the corporate entity with which Innovation PEI had signed a MOU] that I found on a barely-legible project chart that I happened to receive in one FOI. Those three letters exposed that Brad Mix was not telling the truth when he said that he did not know anything about FMT, in response to a question from CMT’s lawyer. Brad Mix, Paul Jenkins (who was the sole director of FMT at the time, which was early 2011) and Chris LeClair. were all members of that FMT project that Brad Mix was leading, yet Mix said, under oath, that he knew nothing about FMT.

In the absence of consequences for breaking the FOIPP Act, my multi-year hunt for Brad Mix records that resulted in a powerful Order by Ms. Rose, with clear direction to the government to change the way it treats FOIPP applicants, and an Order that then sparked the creation of a Special legislative Committee looking into the deletion of Brad Mix’s egaming records to finally “get to the bottom of who deleted those records”, meeting 14 times from July – October, 2020, and hearing from the top ITSS officials that it was indeed Brad Mix, and could only have been Brad Mix, who was responsible for the deletion of those 2 years of egaming records, but decided bury it completely, and do nothing with it, neither the government, the Liberal Party, nor the Official Green Opposition Party.

EVIDENCE OF CORRUPTION

Successive PEI governments have demonstrated a consistent willingness to deceive the electorate to hide activities that represent an abuse of power for personal gain, or the gain of friends and family.

A CBC article following Brad Mix’s appearance at the Special Committee on Records (which happened after ITTS senior officials Ed Malone and John Brennan appeared before the Committee) reminded readers what Brennan had told the committee about how the deletion of Brad Mix’s records:

1. had to be ‘intentional’;

2. had to be with someone who had log-in, password access;

3. that only ITSS and Brad Mix had such access; and

4. that records show ITSS did not log such access. The logic is conclusive – Mix is responsible for the deliberate deletion of records, with just one variable in play – Mix’s assistant of many years also had access to his email account.

What did Hon. Peter Bevan-Baker tell the media, and Islanders, after Mix’s appearance at the Committee? In a CBC interview he did in front of the legislative assembly after the session he matter-of-factually stated: “Brad says he didn’t do it, and I take him at his word.”

The CBC web article put it like this:

“After today’s testimony, Opposition Leader Peter Bevan-Baker said he was convinced that Mix did not delete those emails, but that the situation ‘is frustrating.’ “There are really no other paths down which we can go to try and find out what actually happened here,” Bevan-Baker said, but that his primary concern is figuring out how to avoid something like this from ever happening again.”

In that same article, meanwhile, readers were reminded that ITTS officials had told Mr. Bevan-Baker only weeks before that it could only have been Brad Mix responsible for the deletion of the records:

Just a few weeks before Mix testified, John Brennan, the province’s director of business infrastructure services, told the same committee the emails could not have disappeared during a phone upgrade. He also said if the data had been corrupted IT would be able to see the corrupted data and possibly repair it. And Brennan said the emails could not have been deleted accidentally. When asked if there was anyone else who had proxy access to his email account, Mix identified his administrative assistant but said, “I’ve worked with that person for 15 years and quite trustworthy, that person for sure.”

That Hon. Behan-Baker would have said “there are really no other paths down which we can go” shows that he was clearly attempting to end the investigation by misleading Islanders. There was not only a “path” to go down, but the ITSS officials had mapped out EXACTLY what that path was, and told the Committee members the precise steps to take to access those archives of records with missing emails, as that particular “environment” had been duplicated back in early 2015 by ITSS and retained completely, remaining just as it was when they set up that “off-server” archive of multiple egaming accounts.

In particular, MLA Sidney MacEwen was particularly excited about what he called “new information,” and promised that the Committee would be anxious to get their hands on that document. Here is the back-and-forth between ITSS official John Brennan/Ed Malone and MacEwan:

John Brennan: (Indistinct) current environment – the environment that Ed created back there still exists and is under the control of ITSS. The request would be – you would have to identify the individuals whose email accounts you’d want us to look at or grant access to someone to look at. And then, the current deputy of those departments who own the records would have to sign off and authorize that search for those individuals to do so. It could be – not knowing the individuals, but it could be one department or four departments, so you’d need four individual deputy ministers to authorize the search because the deputy holds the ownership of the records. From a process perspective, the request would have to come in, the request would have to be reviewed, and then the individual deputy ministers would have to authorize the search because of where those individuals fall in the departments.

Mr. MacEwen: Okay, thank you. So, that did not happen. On April 27th, 2015 – around that timeframe – the deputy minister at the time did not request that.

Ed Malone: No.

Mr. MacEwen: So, at that time, you said there was a document that would have been passed on to you that kind of outlined what they were looking for and I think you had said the scope had narrowed so you could be more specific. Where would that document be? Would the AG have that? Has that been published?

Ed Malone: The AG would have that. That’s part of the documents that I provided to the executive. I still have a copy of that also – an actual paper copy.

Mr. MacEwen: We would love to see that….I don’t know if that’s been made public or not, but it would be interesting to see what was requested at that time and then even how that scope was narrowed. I know, as a committee, I think – already guessing that we’ll be looking at going down that path to find out that nth degree – to make sure that we follow that path down to see what can possibly be done. I don’t know if a forensic audit of that situation would find that or not, but I think we’re comfortable enough to maybe send that request into government to get whoever needs to sign off to make that happen as well. (October 14, 2020, p. 159).”

Then a few weeks later, after Brad Mix’s presentation, in the same above-referenced CBC article, we read that Mr. MacEwan is baffled about what to do next, so throws out a call for a “forenic audit” – whatever he has in mind for that is unclear, but we never heard about that again either:

“At some point, somebody did something to make those emails delete,” said MLA Sidney MacEwen. He said he wants a forensic audit done to determine exactly what happened.

“It’s frustrating that, you know, we still haven’t been able to put our finger right on the detail of what’s missing.” 

Neither a “forensic audit” happened, nor the promised investigation by Premier King by a non-governmental, third party agency. MacEwen’s words reveal that a decision had clearly been made sometime after the meeting with the ITSS officials to drop the entire affair, notwithstanding MacEwen and Bevan-Baker both responding to the shocking new revelations from ITSS at the time with apparent enthusiasm, seemingly keen to get busy with the next steps of the investigation.

PC MLA MacEwan then claimed that the Committee members weren’t able to put their finger “right on the detail of what’s missing,” but he and his fellow committee members were given exactly what they needed when Mr. Malone informed committee members that he had retained a copy of a letter he had prepared for deputy-minister of EGTC at the time, Dan Campbell. He crafted a letter providing details about the status of email accounts for a number of government personnel involved with egaming, with a number of them having “gaps” and a significant amount of deleted records.

MacEwan was made aware of the logical next steps in investigating the detail concerning missing records, but he and his colleagues chose to never mention that key letter from Ed Malone again. They didn’t investigate the matter, pretending, presumably, that it had never been disclosed to them in the first place, but it was of course, and remains a matter that needs to be further investigated.

It’s sadly ironic to me that MacEwan identified that letter as the “path” when he said: “I think – already guessing that we’ll be looking at going down that path to find out that nth degree – to make sure that we follow that path down to see what can possibly be done,” then shortly thereafter , claimed it impossible to put his finger on the detail of what’s missing,” Bevan-Baker used the same word, “path”, when he declared as he put things to bed (forever) that there was no such route available to take further steps in an investigation, when he told CBC reporter: ”…there are really no other paths down which we can go.”

As things turned out, the final report was submitted to government with no recommendations to do anything by way of further investigation, despite those significant “leads” that could have indeed fulfilled the promise of the committee to “get to the bottom of who destroyed those records.”

This is what corruption looks like. It’s been going on forever in PEI, and it needs to be stopped. If you don’t take action to hold those committing such offences accountable, who will?

I am therefore asking you. on behalf of all Islanders, to immediately undertake – and publicly announce – a priority investigation into this matter that will prove every Islander wrong who convinced that the guilty in government “…will never be held accountable….they never are!”

THE “PATH” to the “DOCUMENT DETAIL” ELUDING MACEWEN AND BEVAN-BAKER

ubmitted a FOI request for that document Mr. Malone told the Committee he had in his possession, and received some detail, but the letter did not provide all the detail Mr. Malone promised to provide, but then again, it didn’t end up coming from him, but the Deputy Minister of Finance. I received additional documentation in that FOI request, which provided more detail about who among those involved in egaming in 2010-2012 who had missing egaming records.

Again, neither our government nor any Opposition MLAs have felt the need to mention this again, despite considerable enthusiasm while their responses were being recorded by the camera at the time, and strong statements of commitment that they finally got what they needed to really go to town with the investigation. Last we heard of it.

THE OIPC’S PREVIOUS ORDER TO PC MLAs USING PARTY EMAILS

My request revisits a matter already dealt with recently by the OIPC.

Former Commissioner Karen Rose addressed the issue of using “non-foippable” means of communication for government work in response to a complaint about such a practice being followed by Hon. Brad Trivers, a member of the King government’s Cabinet, and, incidentally, a person mentioned as a “non-party” respondent in the litigation just filed against the Premier by Maines.

As I understand it, Brad Trivers and his wife Karen, owned the internet company involved with the above-mentioned email at the time it was sent, being the provider hosting PC Party email accounts. The Plaintiffs are seeking a “Preservation Order” for those records from the PEI Supreme Court.

The details of the Brad Trivers’ use of a non-government email account for constituency business and the complaint to the Privacy Commissioner were captured in a CBC titled, “P.E.I.’s education minister to phase out use of his private email account | CBC News”:

“P.E.I.’s Privacy Commissioner Karen Rose told CBC News, “Ideally, email responses from government representatives should come from government email addresses. From a records-management perspective, this means that such emails may be saved to the proper file, and accessed where appropriate, including in response to freedom of information requests…There must be a mechanism to ensure that such emails are saved to appropriate files, and available for access.”

PREMIER KING’S SWORN RESPONSE TO THE ALLEGATIONS

On September 17, 2021, Premier King swore an affidavit within hours of receiving the Notice of Motion, even before a Statement of Claim had even been filed by the Plaintiffs.

Paragraph 4 of Mr. King’s Affidavit reads:

“I never received the email that is alleged to have been sent by Allan Campbell on May 20, 2021 to dennis@peipc.ca. “

On September 24, 2021, the CBC interviewed Premier King, and reported in an article titled, “‘I don’t know where all this is coming from,’ King says of e-gaming allegations | CBC News,” the following claim made by Premier King:

“I’ve never used a Progressive Conservative email, I’ve never had access to that email — that’s an email that we use to blast out to the party, it’s not something that I’ve ever had to sign-in or ever used,” King told CBC News, adding the only email account he uses is his government account.”

The key issue here is obviously the claim King has been using a non-government personal email account, which he has denied. How he can say it is not something he has never used is beyond me, since I have evidence refuting that in my inbox, i.e., multiple emails King sent using that email address, but BEFORE HE BECAME PREMIER.

THE “RUSTICO/GAMESYS PREP” EMAIL FROM CAMPBELL

On May 20, 2021 Allan Campbell, Director at Atlantic Aerospace and Defence (AADA) sent the following email to the following recipients: rezwarrior_2000@hotmail.com; dennis@peipc.ca; info@sunriseltd.ca; and chris@policyintel.ca with the Subject: Rustico/gamesys prep.

Mr. Campbell wrote:

“Hey everyone…Let’s meet at Sims then head out to Ru stico to discuss gamesys proposal. Those who are going to golf on Monday, let me know today so I can confirm.”

Mr. Campbell replaced Mr. LeClair as Premier Ghiz’s Chief of Staff when LeClair left that position in October 2011 to work with McInnes Cooper (under the auspices of his company PolicyIntel) on the egaming project.

Both Campbell and LeClair have significant political backgrounds, as well as a significant, long-standing involvement and interest in online gaming.

Mr. Campbell is the current Provincial Director of the Atlantic Canada Aerospace and Defence Association (ACADA), yet appears to be working on a gaming deal with a company called Gamesys with Premier King involved.

Gamesys is associated with a gentleman named Keith Laslop, who remains at the centre of the egaming lawsuit with CMT vs PEI from the 2010-2012 days, as well as a part of my own investigation.

None of the recipients of Allan Campbell’s May 20, 2021 email – other than dennis@peipc.ca – is with the PEI government. From appearances, info@sunriseltd.ca appears to be Mr. Frank Zhou’s discreet address. Zhou is a well-known Island businessman, and has been the key PNP “Intermediary’ who has almost exclusively been the conduit bringing Chinese immigrants (and Buddhists) to PEI from China and Taiwan for many years. Alan Campbell worked in lock-step with Mr. Zhou for the years that he (Campbell) was Director of Immigration for Innovation and Advanced Learning, then Minister of the Department.

I know Mr. Zhou well, as well as his wife Sherry Huang. They own Study Abroad Canada, an English Language School, among many other businesses and companies.

As the Executive Director of the PEI Association For Newcomers to Canada [2000-2010], I (and my staff) made daily decisions on placements of our immigrant clients in Study Abroad, along with Holland College. Beyond that ongoing working relationship with Mr. Zhou and Ms. Huang, I also sat on a Chamber-of-Commerce Immigration Committee/Working group with Mr. Zhou for a few years.

Being familiar with Mr. Zhou’s companies, his history of travel back and forth to China with both former Liberal Premiers Ghiz and Maclauchlan, as well as leading trade missions to China for a number of Prime Ministers of successive federal governments including Trudeau, especially his close working relationship with former Premier Maclauchlan on the “Anne in China” business initiative and the launch of Cows in China. One of Zhou’s financial management companies boasts assets of over 1 billion. [See: “https://en.sunriseltd.ca/sunrise-capital].

Knowing Mr. Zhou and his influence globally as well as I do, I must say that I was very surprised to see his email address on Allan Campbell’s email about meetings to discuss “gamesys” as a recipient! For a bit of information and background on Mr. Zhou,see the following:

Entrepreneur Frank Zhou building business in P.E.I. and China | SaltWire

Cows in China | Rotary Club of Hillsborough (clubrunner.ca)

Mr. Frank Zhou, President of Sunrise Group, was invited to participate in the Alibaba’s Gateway’17 Canada held in Toronto | Sunrise Group LTD (sunriseltd.ca)

It is difficult to believe that someone with Mr. Campbell’s professional political background would send this email coordinating plans to discuss a gaming proposal to a group of prestigious businessmen, along with Premier King’s personal PC Party email, dennis@peipc.ca, if that email was only used to blast announcements out to Party members as Premier King claimed. I don’t believe the Premier would be able to produce any such “blast emails” from that account personally, and he needs to explain when that happened. I’m almost certain it never did.

I have been a member of the PEI PC Party since 2018. I receive all blast emails from the PC Party, and they all come from “info@peipc.ca”.

The dennis@peipc.ca email was assigned to Premier King before he was elected Premier, during the PC Leadership race in which I was also a contender. All 5 candidates in the running were issued a PC email address with the same format, mine being kevin@peipc.ca.

I have copies of emails from dennis@peipc.ca from the period of time during which the PC leadership race was underway; however, the last email that Mr. King sent from this address as a blast was about the successful Convention, then the email went “dark,” which was no surprise to me – we had each been informed by the PC executive when those emails on the PC server were assigned to us that they were “temporary”.

Those emails, we were told, had a single purpose: to allow candidates to send out “blasts” to the PC membership in a bid to win their vote. Once the leadership race was over, that single purpose no longer existed, and my PC email address was disabled, as were the other contenders, but apparently the email assigned to Dennis King remained active on the PC Party system.

I am very concerned that the Premier has apparently been using this email account to avoid disclosure of his communications about government-related business and activities. Who has he been meeting with? What is he planning outside the normal processes and channels of government? Is the Premier documenting and disclosing the business of government in accordance with the spirit of transparency, the values and principles of democracy, not to mention the promises he made upon which his government’s election was, at least in part, made possible.

A “PERSONAL” EMAIL ACCOUNT – BUT A “PUBLIC” RECORD

In the PEI FOIPP Act, a record is defined at 1 (l):

1. (l) “record” means a record of information in any form, including electronic form, but does not include a mechanism or system for generating, sending, receiving, storing or otherwise processing information;

I am especially concerned to read in the PEI Supreme Court filings by the Plaintiff that I – presumably as a result of my ongoing investigation into online gaming – was singled out by Premier King as someone he did not want to know anything about “…a clandestine e-gaming file known as ‘Gamesys’…,” so he, allegedly, told those involved not to use his government email address:

The contrast between the reality (perhaps not known by many more Islanders than those dealing with APSO in FOI requests) and Premier King’s claims to be as legal and transparent as possible came into stark focus when he was challenged by the leader of the Opposition in the House about the long delays and other problems with FOI requests.

The Premier’s account of this government’s “management” of the FOIPP system has not been my experience, at all – this is from p. 736 of Hansard from the March 30, 2021 Question Period:

REQUEST FOR AN INVESTIGATION

There are many questions that the sworn allegation that Premier King specifically mentioned me as a person who should not be able to access government records on this “Gamesys Proposal:

How is it that the PEI Director of Atlantic Aerospace and Defence is organizing meetings with the Premier and private citizens to discuss how they could personally benefit (according to whistle-blower testimony) from the online gaming scheme? How does such a business venture fit into his job duties?

If Premier King doesn’t have access to this email account, dennis@peipc.ca as he claims, then who does?

Who did Allan Campbell intend to send this to at the PC headquarters if not Premier King, since the email address belongs to him?

How are these communications, meetings, and plans involving online gaming and the Premier being captured in official records so they are available to the public, and would show up in a search for online gaming records to the Premier’s Office in FOI requests?

There are many more questions, but the key question is – and purpose for this submission to you is this: “Will you will accept my request to investigate this matter on my behalf, and on the behalf of all Islanders?

What I am precisely asking for with this request for an Investigation by the OIPC

This request to investigate this matter of the Premier allegedly using a non-foippable email address to keep records from me (and Paul Maines, who was also specifically mentioned by King, according to the Investigator’s sworn testimony) presumes that you have the power to conduct the investigation that I am asking you to undertake, which I’ll describe with some detail subsequently.

What first needs to be addressed is the basis upon which an investigation is warranted.

On the face of it, looking at the FOI Act narrowly, records in the personal email accounts of members of the Executive Council are regarded as “exempt” from the FOI process, and would not be subject to a review by your office. In section 4(1) it states that the Act does not apply to….”(i) a personal record or constituency record of a member of the Executive Council;”

The argument could be made that an email account belonging to the PC Party assigned to the Premier meets the grounds for such an exemption and falls outside the scope of the Act, as well as what you can investigate. That’s why this matter must be viewed from a broader perspective, with the spirit and intent of the FOIPP Act in mind.

There are provisions within the Act that, as I read the statute, an investigation; indeed, given the fundamental violation of the #1 purpose stipulated in the Act, such an investigation is both imperative and urgent.

Section 50 describes your key role as Commissioner to “monitor” how the purpose of the Act is being achieved, and to do that, conduct investigations.

An assessment of the “purpose” of the FOIPP Act reveals a broader intention for reviews by the OIPC than a request from an applicant, with the very first of a list of such purposes in section one being as follows:

I’m sure the “spirit” or intent of this provision would also capture and include not only the “records in the custody” but the “records that SHOULD be in the custody of…,” but were illegally kept hidden from the FOIP process in non-government email accounts, which produces the same outcome for FOI applicants as if they were illegally ‘deleted’, i.e., they were deleted from the FOI search.

It is on that basis, principally, that I’m requesting that you initiate an investigation into the allegation (sworn) that Premier King is using non-government means of communication to deliberately prevent me from accessing records of his activities to which I, and all Islanders, including other MLAs, should have access to receiving through the FOIPP Process.

THE OBJECTIVE [ i.e., “THE HOPED-FOR REMEDY”] FOR AN OIPC INVESTIGATION

Some of the “findings” in Karen Rose’s Order on the Brad Mix deleted records were:

In the summary on the top of page 2 of the Order, it states:

“The applicants also raised the possibility that someone had intentionally deleted the missing emails, to avoid public access. The Commissioner concluded that there was insufficient evidence to make such a finding, but found that the EGTC failed to comply with rules relating to the destruction of records, in violation of the Archives and Records Act.”

The public body objected to my request to Commissioner Rose to even decide on that issue, arguing that to do so would be at odds with another provision within the Act that compels the Commissioner to report offences of legal significance to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General’s Office.

I now agree with the Public Body on this point, i.e., that the appropriate outcome, or course of action, following an investigation into whether the Premier is indeed engaged in illicit activities and government-related business using a non-government email account, to evade disclosure of what should be an official government, would be to bring the matter, and evidence, to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General.

In that way, the purpose expressed in the FOIPP Act asking the Commissioner to do this where appropriate makes provision for at least the possibility of seeing some appropriate remedy under the law, and within the courts, regardless of whether the offence is a violation of provincial statutes, the Criminal Code of Canada, or possibly both. The charges being alleged in the PEI Supreme Court action against Premier King are not trivial: “…civil conspiracy, misfeasance in public office, fraudulent misrepresentation, and obstruction of civil justice….”

SUMMARY

The FOIPP Act empowers you to monitor the administration of the Act by Government to ensure that the law is being followed. To do this, the Act grants broad powers to ensure that such inquires can be undertaken and concluded successfully, and the fact that the investigation takes you to a personal account of the Premier – dennis@peipc.ca – should be of no consequence:

When a core “purpose” of the Act is under siege from embedded corruption that never brings consequences, even when it is exposed – such as most certainly would be the case if the allegations against Dennis King that are now before the PEI Supreme Court are proven to be true – then the normally limiting features of the Act [legislation that was drafted to deal principally with specific complaints and requests from Islanders unhappy with the outcome of FOI requests] would waive any technical considerations seemingly otherwise blocking or limiting such an investigation.

The allegation that Premier King is working on an online gaming proposal “off-site” using a non-foippable email account to prevent me from acquiring records in a FOI request for such records actually meets that almost impossibly high bar of needing evidence that there was not only a deliberate intention to destroy or otherwise make unavailable records containing government-related business.

Although the Act empowers you to embark on this investigation on your discretion without an ‘active’ investigation – based on the overarching concern that the purpose of the Act is being frustrated, as I outlined above – I should nonetheless point out that for all intents and purposes there is an ‘active’ investigation in that I had submitted a FOI request after learning about the Order in Council that was authorized on December 23, 2020, and received a “No records found” response from Deputy Minister of Finance at the time, Dan Campbell [I accepted that outcome, thinking it was indeed likely too early for “contracts.”In retrospect, I should have said “documents pertaining to the negotiation of contracts” or something to that nature, not just “contracts”].

I know you have many reviews on your desk at the present time; however, as I noted earlier and believe the record shows clearly, this government is not heeding directives from your office to stop breaking the law, and without any resolve evident in your Office (to date, at least) to seek appropriate remedies to legal offences by bringing those offences to attention of the Minister of Justice and Attorney General’s office, what will be the point of a long list of rulings?

That’s why I’m asking that you make an investigation into Premier King’s PC Party email, dennis@peipc.ca, an urgent priority. Islanders are looking to your office to restore public trust in our ability to access information about government to which the law entitles us.

By identifying whether Premier King has been using his PC Party email account inappropriately to hide records on his plans regarding online gaming, and possibly other matters which should be government records, and is, therefore, not complying with the law as found in Prince Edward Island Freedom FOIPP Act.

Sincerely,

Kevin J Arsenault, PhD

Attachments:  AFFIDAVIT OF DERRICK SNOWDY;  ALLAN CAMPBELL EMAIL

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