Several elders Ford government Staff members have given the emails of their personal accounts concerning the Greenery And writing mandate letters, Global News learned, after the Information and Privacy Commissioner ordered them to find their accounts for communications relating to official government activities.
Among the staff members to discover emails that they had not discussed before, there was the former executive assistant of Prime Minister Doug Ford, who gave managers an email which he received from a developer relating to the greenery.
E-mails, given to the NPD of Ontario as part of a call for freedom of information, reveal that a developer thanked Ford’s executive assistant for having “taken the time to help” with their “problem of greenery”.
The email was sent on July 4, 2022, only a few days after the Minister of the then Steve Clark received a letter of mandate in which Ford asked him to “codify the processes for exchanges, extensions, contractions and political updates for the greenery belt”.
A spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s office defended the discovery of emails.
“At the request of the Commissioner for Information and Privacy, and by abundance of caution, our office contacted former staff members to confirm any file that they could have had on personal accounts,” they said.
“The projects of files related to the vast policy proposal were created during a transition period immediately after the election. The final versions of these files were previously identified in this request, and relevant parties were published publicly.”
Ontario’s NPD chief Marit Stiles suggested that the use of personal accounts was a deliberate strategy to hide communications.
“What we have found is more and more a government pattern, the best political employees of the Prime Minister’s office, which makes information very difficult, hiding information, emails in private accounts as a means of bypassing the laws that clearly say that people have the right to know,” she said.
“What is shocking is the extent to which they tried to hide this.”
One of the emails held on a personal account concerned Sergio Manchia, director of developments in Urbancore.
He had, for 20 years, was lobbying in the province to withdraw a four hectare plot in Hamilton from the greenery belt.
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During the summer of 2022, however, the effort to convert property into residential land took a renewed emergency when Manchia and his colleagues learned that the Ford government was considering changes in the greenery belt.
“I remember that we are planning an announcement,” Manchia told the Ontario integrity commissioner during the investigation of the office greene belt.
While the words of the moves of imminent lands began to spread, Manchia sent an email to two members of the Ford office on July 4 and 5, 2022: the assistant of Ford then executive and the director of relations with the stakeholders of the time.
The two were contacted by Manchia using their private email addresses.
“Thank you for taking the time for helping us more about our” glitch “of the Green 4 ha belt that we are working with the city of Hamilton, with the province for some time,” said Manchia in the first email.
“According to our discussion, I wanted to send you a cartography that could well help to describe what I was trying to explain,” said Manchia in a second e-mail on her green belt property in Hamilton.
In an email, Manchia thanks the two employees of Ford and their requests to “advise our next steps”.
A few weeks after these emails, according to the report of the integrity commissioner, Manchia and his team participated in telephone calls with senior executives from the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. They finally participated in meetings in person to discuss the property directly.
Manchia then bought four tickets for a collection of Stag and Doe wedding funds held in the backyard of the Ford family in August 2022 – an event attended by other people linked to the greenery belt scandal, according to information made public by the integrity commissioner.
Ford told the integrity commissioner he had not made a memory of meeting Manchia or having had conversations on the property of the greenery belt.
“The only file relating to a specific property was sent to an individual without any involvement in this file linked to a dismissal proposal which had long -stand support from the local municipality, including a letter from the then mayor of Hamilton and a resolution of the council,” said the Prime Minister’s office.
Manchia did not answer questions from Global News before the publication.
Private email used to write mandate letters
The email of the greenery belt was not the only government communication held on the personal messaging accounts of the former staff members.
In fact, a small slice of documents was given to the Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC) after 15 former members of the Prime Minister’s office were ordered to search for their private messaging accounts and their aircraft to search for files related to the green belt.
“Seventeen records were located,” IPC said in a letter sent to the NDP and shared with Global News.
Among the files were 16 “provocative versions” of the letters of mandate of 2022 Ford would eventually give the ministers of his cabinets, describing management and expectations as manufactured by the Prime Minister’s office.
The files included “the draft versions of the slides” and the “latest slide bridge” of mandate letters – official government files that have been written on private messaging servers.
Emails located by former staff members relate to the greenery belt in one way or another; It is not clear if other government emails were also contained in these accounts unrelated to the greenery belt.
The Prime Minister’s office said the 15 staff members had not located the files but had not responded to how many people had ended up finding messages.
The e-mails of Manchia, according to the IPC, were “located by a former member of the staff of the Prime Minister in his personal messaging account”.
The staff member said that he “did not remember having received the emails” and “did not know how the developer had obtained his personal messaging account”.
The IPC office added that the staff member said that he had not asked, responded to the emails or not transferring emails.
“The staff member also confirmed that he had not had discussions or communications with the developer or anyone on behalf of the developer on emails or the object of emails,” said the IPC office.
A “model” of personal devices
The revelations discovered by the NDP are the last people in a series of cases where the Ford government staff seem to use personal phones and messaging accounts to communicate.
At the end of last year, Prime Minister Ford was ordered to hand over recordings From his personal apparatus, which the IPC said he was probably using to do government affairs. The province is currently calling for this decision, Search for a judicial examination.
“I think it is absolutely a deliberate model where this government is trying to hide from the law,” said Stiles. “We have a criminal investigation of the current RCMP, I am sure that we will see something coming finally. But in the meantime, Ontarians have the right to know exactly what happened here. ”
Elsewhere, the chief of staff of Ford Loss of months of government -related texts on his personal phone and a used its Gmail account to plan government policy.
“These are the best members of the Prime Minister’s office staff,” said Stiles. “There is no way that the Prime Minister does not know what was going on.”
The chief of staff to the Minister of the former Minister of Housing was also sentenced to Look for your personal account for e-mails related to greenery belt. He must either put them back or sign a sworn affidavit by saying that they do not exist.