NDP, Tories call for investigations of erased Pan Am hard drives

Ontario’s opposition parties are asking both the police and the information and privacy commissioner to investigate hard drives from the Pan Am Games that were erased.

Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk said that in her investigation of the Pan Am and Parapan Am Games, she couldn’t obtain many computer hard drives that were disposed of by the organizing committee, including the CEO’s.

The Games were last summer and as staff left, they “selected what they thought should be kept, they loaded it up on a file server, then they disposed of the hard drives,” Lysyk said.

“So it was individuals’ choices as to what was kept or what wasn’t.”

New Democrat Paul Miller wrote to Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Vince Hawkes, asking police to investigate.

“I am calling on you to move quickly to take all necessary steps to ensure that all the information required for a possible investigation is not destroyed or deleted,” Miller wrote. “The outcome of your investigation could hinge on the ability of investigators to seize information in its complete form.”

Progressive Conservative Steve Clark wants information and privacy commissioner Brian Beamish to investigate whether the actions of the Pan Am committee meets record-keeping and freedom-of-information standards.

Clark said he was “disturbed” to read about the Pan Am hard drives, given that police have alleged that hard drives were wiped in the gas plants scandal.

“This is completely unacceptable behaviour by public officials with responsibility for Games with a budget of more than $2.5 billion,” Clark wrote.

Clark also called on the Liberal government to fire Saad Rafi, who was CEO of the Games and has since been appointed as CEO of the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan Administration Corporation.

Michael Coteau, the minister responsible for the Games, said there was nothing nefarious about the deletions.

“(Lysyk) was very clear that the process was followed according to Achives Ontario,” he said. “In addition to that, she says there’s been no wrongdoing.”

The auditor said there’s no way for her to know if she indeed got all of the information that had been on those hard drives.

“I mean, do we suspect that there’s anything that was there that we should have seen that we didn’t? No,” she said. “We don’t have any indication there’s anything improper in this process other than the fact that it wasn’t maintained in the way that, as the auditors, we felt we wanted to see it maintained.”

Lysyk found that the Games in Toronto came in $342 million over budget, but the province still paid more than $5 million in performance bonuses. The government disputes her calculations, saying they came in a bit under budget.