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Prince Albert MLA advised not to use personal email for government business

Apr 4, 2018 | 2:00 PM

First former Premier Brad Wall came under fire for using personal email to conduct government business, and now a Prince Albert MLA is facing the same complaint.

The office of the Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner received a complaint about MLA and Cabinet Minister Joe Hargrave in May of 2017. An investigation report showed the complainant emailed the former Minister responsible for the Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC)  at a “saskparty.com” email address, but later received a response from Hargrave’s “sasktel.net” address, which was a personal and business email account.

The complainant alleged their privacy was breached by Hargrave’s use of a personal email on an unprotected server.

“I am concerned the private email address used by the Minister may not be properly recorded in government record, which begs the issue of freedom of information access,” the complainant said, quoted in the report.

According to the report, Hargrave’s office said he had three email accounts connected to his government-issued phone at the time, and that his political party email was set to forward all emails to his personal/business email account.

“During the time of the incident, the Minister’s device was experiencing operating system problems which intermittently caused it to lock up, prevented him from accessing email and brought accounts together,” the Commissioner`s report read.

Hargrave sought help from IT on more than one occasion, trying to resolve the problems. Eventually, he removed all of the accounts from his device and started again with only his ministerial and MLA accounts remaining on the phone.

On March 23, 2018, Commissioner Ronald Kruzeniski found that the Hargrave`s office was not considered a government institution, and said he had no jurisdiction to investigate the matter. The commissioner did, however, offer advice for avoiding similar issues in the future.

“I recommend the Minister or his staff follow best practice and review all emails on his ‘saskparty.com’ and ‘sasktel.net’ email accounts and ensure that all records created or held that relate to government business be moved into government controlled information management systems with the original deleted from his ‘saskparty.com’ and ‘sasktel.net’ email accounts,” Kruzeniski wrote.

Hargrave was unavailable for comment, but a government spokesperson forwarded paNOW a statement from the Government of Saskatchewan.

“Premier Scott Moe has reminded all cabinet ministers about the importance of using government email addresses for all government business,” the statement read. “This is the expectation for all ministers. If government business is sent by a member of the public to a personal email account for a minister, that email must be sent on to the minister’s government email address.”

 

teena.monteleone@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @teenamonteleone