Montreal councillors’ email privacy questioned

MONTREAL – At least part of the opposition on Montreal city council says it will disconnect from the computer server and telephone system at city hall if it doesn’t get an assurance that the city comptroller’s office isn’t spying on them, Projet Montreal says.

The declaration came shortly before city council was to meet Monday night to discuss the email surveillance of the city auditor-general that sparked a scandal at city hall a week ago -and just after Vision Montreal charged that city comptroller Pierre Reid has had access to the emails of elected officials for almost a year.

"Every time I’ve hung up the phone for the past week I say, ‘Goodbye Mr. Tremblay. Goodbye, Mr. Reid’ and then start to laugh," Projet Montreal leader Richard Bergeron said.

But the issue is serious, he added.

That’s why the party wrote to city council speaker Claude Dauphin on Friday to ask him to guarantee the party that its emails and telephone calls remain confidential, and that he outline how and under what circumstances the administration could authorize that their correspondence or calls become the subject of an investigation, Bergeron said.

"In the absence of a reasonable assurance within a reasonable delay, we’ll be obliged to leave the city’s computer

and telephone network," he said. "We didn’t want to create paranoia around this issue."

The party had intended to keep the steps it took with Dauphin quiet until it received an answer, Bergeron said, but Vision Montreal’s announcement that it had written to the city’s ethics counsellor, Guy Gilbert, to express its concerns about possible intrusions on the computers of the party’s elected officials in the Southwest borough, prompted Projet to speak out Monday

In a letter made public Monday, Louise Harel, leader of the opposition at city hall, said that Vision Montreal’s elected officials in the Southwest borough recently learned that Reid has had access to their correspondence since last year.

In council, Tremblay said he was not aware that the comptroller-general’s office had been given the authority to examine councillors’ emails, or whether such surveillance has occurred.

"It’s an excellent question," Tremblay said in response to a question by Vision Montreal councillor Real Menard about whether councillors have been spied on by Reid. "The council speaker (Dauphin) must answer. As concerns me, I was not informed, but it’s so important that we’ll have to consider it to make sure of what kind of immunity elected officials have."

Borough mayor Benoit Dorais and councillor Veronique Fournier were told that city manager Louis Roquet had placed Reid in charge of the security of their computer correspondence with their constituents or their representatives in March or April 2010 when the two asked borough officials about the privacy of their emails several weeks ago, Harel wrote in a letter to Gilbert.

"You can imagine the concern that causes since learning that Reid, with his team, authorized intrusion into the confidential electronic communications … of the auditor-general," the letter says. "The legitimate question that has to be asked is obviously what that means for elected officials?"

The letter argues that Gilbert should be the person to authorize any intrusion into an elected official’s correspondence, or the Quebec Municipal Commission.

At a crowded news conference last night outside the council chamber before the start of the city council meeting, Harel and Bergeron said they would introduce a joint motion calling for the firing Reid, and another blaming Roquet for "10 months of spying" on auditor-general Jacques Bergeron.

Harel said Mayor Gerald Tremblay would have to answer for sanctioning "illicit, reprehensible and odious" actions in investigating Jacques Bergeron for alleged wrongdoing.

Harel qualified Reid’s investigation, based on a "verbal and anonymous complaint," as being part of a "smear campaign" against the auditor general. Both opposition leaders launched into the city council by denouncing the vetting of Jacques Bergeron’s emails as "an espionage operation."

Reid’s two-page report on the city’s investigation into the auditor general, which was leaked to the media last week, says the surveillance that began in March 2010 confirmed allegations that Jacques Bergeron awarded two $2,500 translation contracts to a family member and allowed two consultants who assisted on his office’s investigations of city contracts to split their billing to avoid going to public tenders. It also says that a consultant being paid by the city contributed to a presentation that Bergeron made at a university. It also reproaches Bergeron for making personal use of city equipment to prepare a presentation by a computer security firm the report says he runs to the Centre jeunesse de l’Outaouais and to exchange "many" emails with his students and personnel at the Ecole des hautes etudes commerciales. And it reproaches Bergeron for writing an email to a journalist suggesting an article on a decision to transfer the whistleblower hotline from Bergeron’s office to Reid’s comptroller office last year.

On the weekend, city councillors received a copy of Bergeron’s own report detailing the surveillance of his emails.

In it, Bergeron calls the intrusions by the city’s comptroller-general into his electronic records and correspondence "unprecedented" and "extremely grave."

On Friday, Bergeron sent a lawyer’s letter calling for senior city officials to turn over to him copies of all documents or electronic messages gathered in their investigation of his activities.

Bergeron is expected in council this morning to answer the allegations against him.

Irwin Block of The Gazette contributed to this report