Wiped records not ‘personal,’ Crown says as judge reserves at gas plants trial
TORONTO — The question of whether two senior political staffers illegally destroyed politically embarrassing data in the office of former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty was left Wednesday with the judge who has presided over the pair’s trial.
Ontario court Judge Timothy Lipson reserved his decision after a day of closing arguments in which he heard starkly different views of the evidence against McGuinty’s chief of staff David Livingston and his deputy Laura Miller.
In his final submissions, Crown lawyer Tom Lemon argued the accused deliberately set about deleting records about the government’s costly 2011 decision to cancel two gas plants as a way to ensure the information would never see the light of day.
The key question, Lemon told Lipson, is why the accused went to “extraordinary” lengths to clean computer hard drives, most of which weren’t even theirs.