Former cabinet minister Ted Morton's secondary email address was not a breach of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act, according to the freedom of information and privacy commissioner.
Commissioner Fred Work cleared Morton and his staff of the practice of using a secondary email address, in this case under Morton's given name Fredrick Lee.
"The bottom line is we found no evidence of intent to use this email address to delay or defeat the freedom of information and privacy act," Work said at a news conference Tuesday.
The allegations about Morton were dropped in a CBC story in the weeks before the first ballot of the Progressive Conservative leadership race.
The CBC asked for emails written using Morton's second account about the province's land use framework. The media outlet had the emails in question but asked for them to see if Morton's secondary account would hide their existence. They did not receive the records after a FOIP request.
A former staff member of Morton's, Derrick Forsythe, also told the CBC the account was specifically to hide some of the minister's communications from the public eye.
Work said his investigator interviewed a total of 16 people and only Forsythe said the email was meant to evade public scrutiny. Work said the emails the CBC requested weren't found for a variety of reasons, including the structure of the email system and the structure of the FOIP act.
Work said he is now going to look into how these records are handled because, even if there is no intent to hide, if the system can't find information it stymies requests.
"Clearly if they can't be found it defeats your ability to have access to them, so that is what we are going to be talking about next; how to manage this better," he said.
Interestingly, Morton himself was not interviewed as part of the investigation. Work said he didn't think the minister was central to the accusations being levied.
Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman was on hand for the release and said she respects Work's work, but believes he got this investigation wrong and that Morton was trying to hide his correspondence.
"I think that the minister was a scofflaw," Blakeman said. "I think he did intend to make his communications more difficult to access by using an email that was not commonly known."
She also said the act is too narrow and needs to do more to make it clear the public has a right to government information.
"I don't think that the act always serves the public, the media and members of the opposition as well as it should," she said.
Political fallout
Local MLA Ken Allred, who was one of Morton's backers during the leadership race, said the timing of the allegations against Morton was a problem for his campaign.
"It is unfortunate because people who really understood the issue could see it wasn't really a big issue," Allred said.
While he felt the situation is very troubling, he didn't know if it changed the outcome of the race.
"I don't know if it would have made a difference in the final result, because there was such a large gap between the third and fourth place finisher," he said.
Allred said his office uses two emails because occasionally they are overwhelmed with email on specific topics. As an example, he said his office was inundated when the province was pressured to close the doors of GuZoo, a private zoo in southern Alberta.
"We got about 2,000 emails a day on that thing and most of them were from overseas," he said. "So I can see the problem and what [Morton] was trying to get around."
