No 'triple deleting' of emails: city

Members of council are brushing up on Freedom of Information rules.

A joint Local Government Management Association and Local Government Leadership Academy webinar this morning will cover best practices, including discussion on elected officials using personal and municipal emails and calendars and social media.

It's perfect timing, said Coun. Brian Skakun, in light of recent spotlights on the B.C. provincial government "triple deleting" emails pertaining to the Highway of Tears and on the City of Vancouver, where its chief of staff was found to be regularly deleting emails.

"It's so important that people have access to government records," said Skakun.

This year, the city switched its email domain from the more-cumbersome city.pg.bc.ca to princegeorge.ca and individual councillors were given a city email address (the mayor already had one).

Now, all emails sent and received from those accounts are automatically saved on a city server that has very limited access, said administrative services head Walter Babicz. Previously, only messages to a councillor's personal email address would be saved if they originated from a city hall address or were sent to a city hall address, leaving correspondence between councillors or members of the public unarchived.

But that doesn't mean those personal accounts wouldn't be subject to freedom of information and protection of privacy laws, said Babicz.

"Regardless of what email account is used, if the subject matter of the email relates to city business in terms of their duties or activities as a member of council, then it is subject to FOI laws," Babicz said.

Skakun said he's already received about 3,400 emails to his new city account this year and Babicz confirmed that those accounts were upgraded from one to four gigabytes of storage. But deleting messages from their individual inboxes (for anyone with a city email address) doesn't remove it from the city server.

"It's all saved, without us having to worry about what we are supposed to keep," said Skakun. "We can't hide information and delete it. That's good news and it's good for democracy."

Babicz said the city's IT department has told him that city emails can't be "triple deleted" from the server.

"Very few people actually have access to that," he said, citing one designated person in IT and one in records management. "We keep that fairly secure."