Leak II - Kenny 'misquotes' PCO official

The Privacy story continued yesterday. From Hansard, a very careful statement from Kenny:

" Mr. Speaker, let me tell you what the assistant secretary to the cabinet at the Privy Council Office said. He said that the reporting of this discussion was a practice introduced by the former government, that this sort of practice took place in the former PMO and its communication team. "

Kenny is referring to the practice of providing notes of briefings and discussions to key political staffers. Nothing odd here at all, though I am quite sure that keeping political staffers aware of evolving situations is not something the Liberals thought of first...

But Kenny continues:

"Mr. Speaker, how will we put a stop to the practices of the former Liberal government? Today we were astonished to discover that it was a regular practice of the previous government to take private information and ask public servants to send the private information of Canadians to political staff in the offices of the Prime Minister and other ministers. "

And that is where he went wrong.

Let me repeat this.

Never did I askcivil servants, or was I asked by PMO, for the private information of anyone filing an access request.

Not once.

And the PCO official Kenny cited would back me up on this, as reported in the Globe today

"In fact, Mr. Eisler's statement did not say that the Liberal government had regular access to the names of people requesting information under the access to information legislation.
Instead, he appeared to be speaking only about the practice of sending out summaries of telephone conversations "

So the questions remain.

Why was the information disclosed?

How long did this go on?

And why did no one stop it until they got caught?