Mayor's office appears to have no record of mayor's interviews

The City of Vancouver could find no record of Mayor Gregor Robertson conducting any interviews or providing any media briefings on April 17.

This is despite Robertson being quoted in articles about the Vancouver Art Gallery's proposed move to Larwill Park in the following morning's editions of the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun.

I filed a freedom-of-information request for records of the mayor's interviews and media briefings on April 17 after the two corporate papers were favoured with leaks about an important staff report before it went on the city website.

Details of city manager Penny Ballem's report went to the Globe and Mail and Vancouver Sun in advance of everyone else—and they dutifully quoted the mayor in the articles.

On April 17, the document didn't go live on the city website until after 7 p.m., and the mayor's news release wasn't issued until 8:02 p.m.

More than a half hour earlier, the Globe and Mail story was already going around the Twitterverse, complete with a comment from Robertson.

But according to the city, there's no record in the mayor's office on that day of any interviews or media briefings provided by Robertson or his chief of staff, Mike Magee.

Today, I wrote to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner seeking a review of this situation.

I'm mystified how the mayor can be interviewed by two newspapers without any record of an interview or media briefing in his office on the day before publication of the articles.

As the commissioner sorts through this mystery, here are some theories rattling around in my brain:

• The Sun's Darah Hansen and the Globe's Frances Bula are psychic, and they visualized what the mayor might say about this situation.

• The mayor's henchmen wrote a statement and emailed it from a private account. And the newspapers did not indicate to their readers that they had received emailed statements from the mayor's office. 

• The city communications office emailed a statement from the mayor without any record going to the mayor's office.

• The city's freedom-of-information office merely asks city staff if there are documents rather than actually doing the necessary legwork to examine the servers. And members of the mayor's staff forgot about those interviews on April 17 with their boss.

• The interviews occurred more than a day before the articles went to the printer, and the journalists sat on the information until someone granted permission for them to report on this matter.

I would never suggest that members of the mayor's office violated the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act by lying about a lack of records about media interviews conducted by the boss. Not only would that be unethical, it could come with a high price tag attached.

When Canada's former chief of the defence staff, Jean Boyle, decided to circumvent the federal access-to-information legislation in response to requests from CBC reporter Michael McAuliffe, Boyle ended up losing his job.

I can't imagine that members of Robertson's staff would be so stupid in light of this history, which received nationwide coverage in the 1990s.

Anyone interested in learning more about McAuliffe's efforts should check out this fascinating account by journalist and author Cecil Rosner.