No emails found between Alberta premier's office, prosecution following weekend search, justice ministry says

A search of nearly a million government emails found no evidence of contact between Alberta premier's office staff and the Alberta Crown Prosecution Service, the province's justice ministry says.

Public service employees, who are non-partisan, conducted a weekend search "for any emails sent to or received by the relevant prosecutors and staff in the premier's office" during a four-month period, said a statement from the justice ministry Monday.

The public service commission and IT experts conducted the search between Friday and Sunday and reviewed incoming, outgoing and deleted emails, the statement said.

Premier Danielle Smith said on Saturday she had asked for the search after CBC News reported on Thursday that a premier's office staffer sent a series of emails to Crown prosecutors, challenging their assessment and direction on court cases connected to last year's Coutts border blockade and protests.

Sources told CBC News the staffer sent the emails last fall that critiqued prosecutors' assessment of charges laid and pushed back on characterizations of the protests.

CBC News has not seen the emails.

Smith said in a Monday morning statement that she is confident in the integrity and professionalism of her staff and grateful to the public service for conducting the weekend review.

"An independent Crown prosecution service, free from political interference, is integral to the preservation of public confidence in the justice system," Smith said in the statement.

In an email, Chuck Thompson, head of public affairs for CBC, said the organization stands behind the journalism in the story.

Thompson said any information about sources is confidential.

Rakhi Pancholi, NDP MLA for Edmonton-Whitemud, said she is dissatisfied by the internal review. Over the weekend the Opposition Alberta NDP called for an independent investigation. 

At a news conference Monday, Pancholi raised questions about the scope of the review, and whether it would have captured emails sent to and from private email addresses.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she has confidence in the integrity of her staff after a weekend internal search found no emails between her office and the Alberta Crown Prosecution Service. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press)

She also questioned what the government means by including "relevant" prosecutors in the search.

CBC News has posed questions about the parameters of the search to the justice ministry and is awaiting response.

Pancholi repeated calls for Justice Minister Tyler Shandro to appoint an independent investigator to not only search for possible emails, but interview employees in the premier's office and prosecution service.

"This isn't just about these emails," Pancholi said. 

"We have the premier stating on record, a number of times, almost boasting about it, bragging about the fact that she has talked to prosecutors and asked them questions about charges related to COVID-19 convictions."

United Conservative Party members chose Smith as leader in October after she campaigned on a promise to look at offering amnesty to people who still faced charges for public health violations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Smith has twice said she spoke to Crown prosecutors about charges related to pandemic health violations.

At a Jan. 12 news conference in Edmonton, Smith said:

"We do have an independent justice department and independent Crown prosecutors, and I have asked them to consider all charges under the lens of 'is it in the public interest to pursue?'

"I ask them on a regular basis, as new cases come out, is it in the public interest to pursue and is there a reasonable likelihood of conviction?"

In an interview published online Dec. 23, Smith also told Rebel News she raised the issue with prosecutors.

"I put it to the prosecutors, and I've asked them to do a review of the cases with those two things in mind," she said.

Smith later said in a statement that she used "imprecise" language, and never communicated directly with prosecutors – only Attorney General Shandro and the deputy attorney general.

Just how robust any email search would be depends on how technical employees conducted that search, says John Zabiuk, chair of Northern Alberta Institute of Technology's cybersecurity program and an instructor at the Edmonton-based post-secondary institution.

Searching for keywords relating to the subject of interest could capture more relevant results than examining a specific subset of senders and receivers, he said.

Alberta NDP MLA Rakhi Pancholi reiterated the Opposition's calls for an independent investigation into emails sent from the premier's office to the Crown prosecution's office on Friday, adding there are too many unknowns right now about exactly what was said and by whom. (CBC News)

It should capture any deleted emails if the sender or receiver was using a government address, as those emails would be stored on a server, he said.

Any emails sent between two private email addresses wouldn't be captured by a search, Zabiuk said.

Many organizations also archive older messages to save space, and those would have to be manually returned to the email server to be included in the search, he said.