Yesterday, I noted some apparent contradictions in responses provided by Ministers Christian Paradis and Lisa Raitt to requests for records about the Jaffer affair made of them by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.
Paradis is the Minister of Natural Resources and Raitt is his predecessor in that portfolio.
The committee wanted any Jaffer-related records over a period of time that bridged both their tenures.
The ministers asked the department to look for any records to satisfy the committee's request and replied that no records could be found.
Meanwhile, the Opposition Leaders Office had filed an Access to Information Request asking for something similar but not identical. The Liberals have yet to receive any records through their ATI request but they did receive what's called an extension notice in the ATI trade and, in that notice, the ATI officers in the department of natural resources note that records have been found.
So there's the contradiction: If the ministers say they could identify no records but the bureaucrats in the ATI section say they've found them, what gives?
While neither minister responded to my request to clarify — indeed, Paradis literally swatted me aside as I tried to ask him about it on his way in the House of Commons yesterday — a departmental spokesman, Micheline Joanise, has provided what seems to me to be a reasonable explanation for the apparent discrepancy. What the deparment has found, Joanise, are records related to Glemaud and that's because, for a period of time that's covered by the Liberal ATI request, Glemaud was, for all intents and purposes, an employee of the department. Glemaud was technically a Justice Department lawyer but he was on loan to NRCan to work on some 'green' files.
The documents contained in the [Liberal] Access to Information request ONLY pertain to Patrick Glemaud's role as Department of Justice Legal Council and the work he did with NRCan as a public servant,” Joanisse writes. “The documents DO NOT pertain to Green Power Energy Generation Corp. or Rahim Jaffer.
“The documents that were retrieved either originated at another department (Department of Justice) or are of interest to another department (Department of Foreign Affairs).
“As is the normal process under Access To Information, these other departments are consulted for their perspective prior to the records being released. Departments are entitled to an extension of the 30 day deadline in order to complete these consultations. NRCan will respond to the request as soon as the other organizations have responded.”
The department's ATI coordinator has told the Liberals it could take 120 days to get all those consultations done — DFAIT is one of the slowest departments in all government when it comes to responding to these consultation requests — and then we'll see what Glemaud was up to at NRCan, while he was working there.