The Alberta Privacy Commissioner is investigating the Government of Alberta for deleting 800,000 government emails. The investigation is at the request of the official opposition, who discovered the mass deletion following a freedom of information request. The request revealed sparse inboxes and sent email folders among high-level government staff, including then Chief of Staff, Brian Topp.
Four ministries are under investigation: Transportation, Education, Service Alberta, and the Executive Council Ministries (connected to the Premier’s office).
Service Minister Stephanie McLean –whose ministry is among those under investigation – says she welcomes the investigation as a chance to review the rules with officials. McLean says the government is following the rules on record retention and that it’s necessary to delete emails to save server space. McLean claims that most of the deleted emails in question were “Gap coupons and that kind of thing that we all get in our email.”
Still, the sensational numbers have drawn criticism. Democracy Watch – a non-profit organization that advocates for government accountability – has already cried foul over the deleted emails. According to freedom of information and privacy laws, governments are required to preserve their public records.
In Alberta, records management policies are determined by the Minister of Service Alberta. This is done in consultation with the Alberta Records Management Committee (largely composed of individuals from the Ministry of Alberta Service) which also provides oversight. Democracy Watch argues that the recent mass deletion of emails constitutes an abuse of ministerial power over these policies.
This isn’t the first time the privacy commissioner has investigated the current government. In April 2017, the privacy commissioner launched an investigation into deleted emails related to power purchases from Alberta Power companies. In one instance, the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Department of Energy asked the CEO of a power company to delete an email because it was “sensitive and transitory”.
Moreover, in February 2017, the privacy commissioner condemned the lack of respect for freedom of information requests across government departments. This was most disturbing at senior management levels, where one staffer complained that management didn’t take freedom of information requests seriously. The Service Alberta Minister herself has tacitly acknowledged the issue – stating the government is working hard to change its culture around freedom of information.
Indeed, it’s concerning that the government appears to have not only encouraged, but incentivized their employees to delete emails. In one case, staff of the Department of Transportation were offered $50 Apple Gift Cards if they cleared out a quarter of their emails.
Both Democracy Watch and the Official Opposition have raised concerns over the term “transitory record”. According to access to information laws, the government doesn’t have to retain transitory records. Unfortunately, transitory records aren’t defined in official legislation or regulations. They are, however, defined in manuals used to train government employees in records management policies.
Transitory records are defined as “records in any format that are of short-term value, with no further uses beyond an immediate transaction.” To aid record identification, employees are provided with a chart, listing examples of official and transitory records:
GoA Information Management Branch
And a handy flowchart:
GoA Information Management Branch
All Government of Alberta employees are responsible for deciding whether records are official or transitory. Furthermore, the Transitory Records Schedule (1995/007-A001) delegates to employees the authority to destroy or delete all transitory records, including emails. Individual employees are therefore responsible for determining the value of their emails and managing them accordingly.
Requiring employees to determine if their emails are transitory records is problematic. The definition of a transitory record is broad and it’s unlikely that employees would regularly consult the email flowchart. The potential for employees to delete official records is considerable, especially when a $50 gift card is at stake.
Some official policies emphasize deleting emails. The Information Management Branch provides detailed instruction sheets on how to manage and regularly delete transitory emails within outlook. However, junk and spam have clearly been part of the focus of transitory emails management for some time now. In 2008, the Alberta Record Management Committee issued a circular on managing and deleting junk emails.
The problem is that there’s no way for the public to tell if government employees have been deleting junk emails, legitimate transitory records, or official government records. In terms of government accountability, this is a problem. Not least for the current government, whose records management policies have raised the eyebrows of its citizens.
The advantage of the current policies is that they’re flexible – allowing employees to make quick decisions on their records and get on with their work. As a rule, employees generally spend no more than five seconds on classifying a record. But with a maximum retention period of 30 days for deleted emails, records could be lost before freedom of information requests can be processed.
A solution may lie in adopting a “big bucket” retention strategy for deleted emails. Big bucket retention, initially termed “flexible scheduling”, provides users with a few broad categories under which their records may be sorted. For Government of Alberta employees deleting emails, these could include: internal communications, drafts, duplicates, spam, and other.
Big bucket retention would allow users to quickly classify emails they choose to delete. These emails could then be scanned by automated classification engines to ensure that official records aren’t being disposed of. The application of machine-learning to these engines would improve their accuracy over time. This would provide the Government of Alberta with a more accountable approach to email disposition.
The Alberta Government has landed in hot water a number of times over its deleted emails. There are definite accountability issues with its email disposition policies and decisions. A policy shift is in order and big bucket retention could provide a practical solution to deleting its emails.