At the heart of the
Niagara Region chief administrative officer hiring scandal are 10 digital documents — memos, policy documents, spread sheets, notes — that lay bare the extent to which Carmen D'Angelo had help from the office of former regional chair Alan Caslin and, potentially,
other members of the municipal government.
Seven of those documents were uncovered by
The St. Catharines Standard during nearly two years of investigation into the tainted hiring process in 2016 and the secret and lucrative contract Caslin awarded D'Angelo a year later. Those documents, along with three others crafted by D'Angelo, were found by the team of Ontario Ombudsman Paul Dube during its probe, which lasted more than 450 days.
Over a two-year span, a cadre of regional councillors attempted to discredit the newspaper's reporting by calling into question the evidence the stories relied upon.
Then-Grimsby councillor Tony Quirk suggested during a council meeting that the files could have been faked. Others, including then-Fort Erie councillor Sandy Annunizata and then-Niagara Falls councillorBart Maves called it a "media manufactured controversy" based on false information.
After Toronto lawyer Marvin Huberman, hired by council to investigate the CAO selection process after the first Standard exposé, cleared the hiring process, Niagara Falls Coun. Bob Gale suggested council should take action against a Standard reporter.
"We reacted to a report from Grant LaFleche," Gale said during a July 10 council meeting. "Maybe we shouldn't pay attention to him anymore, and this wouldn't have happened. We should apologize to our employee, or do something about Grant LaFleche. Which it won't happen. I am not expecting that."
People interviewed by the Ombudsman team, including D'Angelo, claimed the digital evidence was planted or fabricated. Forensics experts hired by the Ombudsman to assess the evidence concluded there was only a one in 3.4 x 10 to the 38th power chance the documents were not genuine. (That's 34 with 38 zeroes after it.) A person has better odds of being hit by lightning — the odds are one in 700,000, according to National Geographic — than those files being faked.
So where were
these files and how did The Standard and the Ombudsman's office determine they were authentic?
The whistleblowers told the same story as was later documented in the Ombudsman's report. D'Angelo saved those files on his laptop, which in turn was backed up on the servers of Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority, where D'Angelo was working as CAO in 2016.
Information technology experts consulted by The Standard showed how metadata buried in the documents pointed to their creator, creation date and when they were downloaded. There was no evidence of tampering. In fact, metadata indicated D'Angelo downloaded the same files multiple times, potentially without realizing it. Further, the documents themselves were only a small part of a host of files D'Angelo downloaded. CAO-related files were downloaded alongside thousands of other files, the vast majority of which were not relevant to The Standard's investigation. But they did allow the newspaper to track D'Angelo's download history over a yearlong period.
Some of the files, such as the memos that contained information about other CAO candidates, could be further verified by contacting the people named in the documents. The candidates confirmed the accuracy of the information in those memos, including that they had been part of the CAO selection process.
If this cache of files were tampered with, it would be have been an elaborate hoax worthy of a Bond villain, and there was no indication that had happened.
To ensure the files not tampered with, The Standard made a copy of the complete set of documents. These became the "working copies" reporters could open and examine during the investigation. The original set of files were untouched and secured in the event they needed to be referenced in the future.
The clumsy attempts at the regional level to investigate the controversy — the Huberman probe (criticized by Dube as a poorly executed investigation) and an internal review at the Region actually turned up two of the files and confirmed the authorship and access of Caslin's policy director Robert D'Amboise. Then in a closed session of council, D'Angelo admitted a document written by Caslin's communications director Jason Tamming, was real.
All the evidence, digital and circumstantial, pointed to authentic data.
The Ombudsman's team, using resources and legal powers The Standard does not have, confirmed the data in other ways.
Some documents were found on the Region laptops of both D'Amboise and Tamming, further cementing that they had both the means and the opportunity to create and send the files. The veracity of these files were compared to the ones found on NPCA servers using a method called "hash matching" — which is like fingerprinting for digital files. They matched.
The same method was used to test the other documents tucked away in NPCA servers. They were also found to be authentic.
For more than a year, D'Angelo insisted he could not remember if he downloaded the files, but he never denied it. But under questioning by the Ombudsman he said if he did get them, he got them from Caslin's men.
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