#2

PREAMBLE

Peter Bevan-Baker’s disappointment in not taking home the Cradle of Corruption Cup this year is entirely understandable. In any normal year, he’d have won hands-down!

The sheer audacity of Bevan-Baker’s “in full public view” Cover Up of a cover up amounts to a public admission that he is, as Leader of the Official Opposition, only pretending in that role, along with his claim to be a  dogged “investigator” seeking deleted egaming records of a senior, 20-year veteran bureaucrat, Brad Mix. 

Reviewing this sad narrative reveals that Bevan-Baker – when handed the truth – quickly became the “cleaner” scrubbing away the truth that was  given as testimony by two moral bureaucrats in the Information Technology Shared Services (ITSS) department during their appearance at the Committee.

PBB should have been blowing up Green Party balloons at achieving his long-shot goal of finding out who deleted those “infamous” emails after hearing what John Brennan and Ed Malone from ITSS had to say.

Didn’t happen. 

Bevan-Baker got a shovel and started burying what broke through the surface, in an egregious betrayal of his earlier-stated promise to “…finally get to the bottom of who deleted the emails,” a promise that helped him win Liberal support for Motion 86 and successfully pass it to establish the Special Committee on Records Retention in the Spring sitting of the Legislature, notwithstanding the fact that EVERY PC member voted against the Motion:

A VERY QUICK RECAP

Motion 86 – and the Special Committee on Records it brought into being – came about as a result of an Order from the former Commissioner of Privacy and Information, Karen Rose, who is now PEI’s Prothonotary at the PEI Supreme Court.

The following CBC story on the release of her Brad Mix Order offers a fair summary of what Rose said regarding the key issues of importance mentioned in her report:

That Order from Ms. Rose came about as a result of my investigation into egaming, and a complaint I filed with Ms. Rose after not receiving documents from Hon. Matthew MacKay’s department (before he arrived, when David Keedwell was the Deputy Minister under Liberal Premier Wade MacLauchlan handling my request for Mix records).

Keedwell knew there were no documents – that they had been deleted – but lied to me, as did Ms. Erin McGrath-Gaudet, the current Deputy Minister in the department in her earliest communications. 

The Information Commissioner subsequently joined 4 FOIPP requests for Mix Records that Paul Maines, President of CMT, who was also looking for Mix records.

The Special Committee on Records represented an historically-significant moment for PEI which I should explain, in that it was the first time the collusion with corruption could be seen and documented in the Committee “allegedly” seeking to discover the truth and expose who was behind the destruction of egaming records.

That was only made possible by a policy I developed as part of my platform when I ran for the PC leadership campaign, which I was successful in having King adopt and commit to in the debates leading up to the election, debates for which I provided him in-person 2-3 hour-long briefings just prior to each of the main 4 public debates, including the televised CBC debate.  What did the policy really accomplish?

 “SILENCE” REPLACES “THEATRICS” AT COMMITTEE

EXPOSING ALL-PARTY COLLUSION WITH CORRUPTION

It’s easy to offer the moon when you know you’ll never be called upon to deliver it, and that has been the history of the “theatrics of deceit” in the legislative standing committees for decades in PEI. 

With Government holding the majority vote on all Motions at Committee, whenever Opposition members would pound tables and demand witnesses be brought before the committee to explain themselves, they knew they’d never get what they were asking for…that it would never happen. And it never did…their Motions were always defeated by government. 

Every current PC Cabinet member – as Opposition members –  demanded that the Government call Robert Ghiz to appear before Public Accounts to explain why he destroyed all of Chris LeClair’s records.  Never happened. The Liberals quashed that Motion every time, Attorney General at the time, Jordan Brown, at the helm as I recall. 

Did Myers and Fox and Trivers, and Compton, and Aylward, and MacEwan et. al., really want to see Ghiz appear at Committee to be grilled about his decision to destroy all of Chris LeClair’s records?

Hmmm…..short answer.  NO!

And we know that now with certainty., because those same people, Myers and Fox and Trivers and Compton, et. al., ARE THE GOVERNMENT, and they just had a special Committee established with 14 meetings to look at exactly that issue – the records Ghiz deleted being part of it –  and instead of bringing Ghiz in to be grilled, the person who could (and should) have been able to answer a whole slew of relevant questions, they invited Chris LeClair, who’s record’s Ghiz deleted.

Chris LeClair!  Who’s answer to everything relating to those deleted records was, “I don’t know, I was gone when they went missing and had nothing to do with it.” Fair enough.  So why did they invite him to answer questions they knew he couldn’t answer rather than the guy they knew could (or should)? Oh yeah….all-party collusion with corruption….forgot for a minute.  

The fact that Opposition members now have the power to bring witnesses such as Robert Ghiz and Wes Sheridan, etc. [“what happened to those ‘subpoena’ powers you were going to use Peter??”] and didn’t do so, is itself evidence exposing the true nature of corruption and collusion in our government. 

I’m pretty sure that Bevan-Baker never wanted to hear from 2 moral ITSS people that Brad Mix intentionally-destroyed his 2 years of egaming records.  When HE DID hear that, he definitely responded at the time (live cameras running with a written transcript to follow remember) with GREAT INTEREST AND CONCERN. That later evaporated completely.

The key revelation came from John Brennan in answers to a series of questions from PC MLA Sidney MacEwan.  Brennan eliminated various options that had been bandied about to possibly explain the 2 years of missing Mix records, such as a “phone upgrade” that went bad; or that the data was “corrupted” somehow.

Brennan dismissed those ideas, pointing out that it would require deliberation, and that “corrupt data” implies “data” – and in the Brad Mix case, there was no data, corrupt or otherwise. Things got narrowed down nicely, culminating in this stunning technical declaration of mathematical precision:

Simple math; straightforward legal argument:   a DECISION to log into the email account was necessary, and there were only two entities with logon access (1) ITTS and (2) Brad Mix.  A series of steps were required to remove the emails, indicating a deliberate intention to do exactly that – remove emails. ITTS did not access the account to delete the records, so it’s really simple math, which should have resulted in a criminal charge, immediately (let the court rule on the evidence, but  those are STRONG grounds for a criminal charge proceeding).

But that didn’t happen, it all got buried by Bevan-Baker in support of government corruption, proving that the smiley cooperation Premier King brags about is really collusion of all three parties with corruption, and the loss of a critical Opposition willing to hold government to account, effectively resulting in the death of parliamentary democracy is mourned in silence like we’re at a provincial wake.

Not only was there no mention of the stunning revelation from ITSS in the final report presented to the Legislative Assembly, nor any RECOMMENDATION regarding the need for the Attorney General to follow up with legal charges against Mix, or for government to take steps to effect his removal from his senior position recruiting businesses to PEI, etc., at the time when Mix appeared before the committee, Bevan-Baker indicated he was not going to pursue the issue of Mix deleting his records.

A few weeks after ITSS experts Ed Malone and John Brennan appeared at the Committee, Brad Mix appeared.   Mix simply stated he didn’t delete the records, and shockingly, that was good enough for Bevan-Baker.

Before watching a short clip of Bevan-Baker where he tosses the ITSS experts under the bus in an public endorsement of Brad Mix, giving precedence to what he claimed was the “believability” of Mix’s word (no reasons for that were given) over simple math, hard evidence, and the professional expertise of the 2 top people who know about and understand the government email system….before that, keep in mind that just before that interview, during the committee meeting with Brad Mix present, Hon. Peter Bevan-Baker showed that he fully understood (and hadn’t forgotten) that “simple math”  (testimony from John Brennan) because he put that “ITSS says either they or you did it, and they didn’t” argument directly to Mix, asking specifically to explain how it could be anyone but him who deleted them based on what John Brennan had informed the Committee members: 

HON. PETER BEVAN-BAKER:  “As you might imagine, Sid has covered perhaps the most important ground that we had to talk about this morning. I just want to follow up a little bit on the apparent contradiction that exists between the explanation that you were given – whether that be from ITSS or through the risk management – that, as you put it, there was a technical issue that created the gaps, or at least that’s what you were told, and the very clear statement from John Brennan, who sat in that seat a few weeks ago: that you would have to have intent to delete the emails.” [Special Committee on Records, October 28, 2020, p. 187….Briefings related to Information and Privacy Commissioner Order No. FI-20-007]

Mix indicated that only his Administrative Assistant had access to his email account, and that she would never have done such a thing…which was all committee members apparently needed to hear about that, not apparently considering any possible involvement by her, and her name was never mentioned again. 

So…that left two options: either ITSS destroyed those records, or BRAD MIX!

Simple math.

Yet this is what the dentist with a flair for theatrics and passive politeness said as the leader of the Official Opposition of the PEI Government:

Starting to get the picture?

Bevan-Baker then attempted to erase all trace of the revelation from two honest ITSS government employees, scrambling to put the PEI government corruption genie back in the bottle, outdoing himself with an amazing performance entirely based on fiction, hiding the truth about how the initial cover-up and lies by Brad Mix and those handling his FOIP requests with me and Maines was exposed at the Committee, THEN COVERED UP, as Bevan-Baker did his best to nail the lid on the “deleted document coffin” and bury it forever. 

My apologies….feeling queasy.

So, I completely understand his frustration and sadness in not securing the ribbon of corruption for 2021.  As a failed PC Leadership candidate, I understand what it feels like to have to watch from the wings as King gloats on stage….brazen and bold, acceptance speech delivered with the political poise of a professional pharisee.

“Bad luck Peter” is all I can say.  ….with King’s major deception about the mRNA injections likely to prematurely end the lives of thousands of Islanders…well, deleted records can’t compete with that, no matter how gloriously malevolent Bevan-Baker’s display of corruption. 

Bevan’s corruption play was simply to protect the Insiders so as to secure his access to government power to be able to keep pushing the Green agenda, reins to government that King has apparently forfeited in exchange for Peter Party’s silence on all matters relating to CORRUPTION in government, and there are many such matters, including the betrayal on deep water wells [Greens silent], the betrayal on the Farmland Bank [Greens silent], etc.   So hang in there Peter, there’s always 2022!

NOTE:  For those interested in knowing more about my investigation into the missing Brad Mix records, I’ve included appendices of links to some previous articles I’ve published, as well as links to all the transcripts of the Special Committee Meeting.

APPENDICES

Appendix “A”

Links to Brad Mix-related Articles

Appendix “B”

Special Committee on Records Transcripts

There were 14 meetings, 2 of which were “in-camera”.  There are, therefore, transcripts of 12 meetings of the Committee as follows.