I was looking at this memorandum city officials wrote on October 5, after they had received this request. They stated:
Staff had not anticipated this new requirement from Treasury Board because both the Federal and Provincial governments have been quite clear over the three years of negotiations that they were not parties to the City's contract in any way. In fact, the Memorandum of Understanding between the City and the Federal and Provincial governments explicitly states that the Federal and Provincial governments were not parties to the procurement process or any contractual arrangements the City was undertaking for this project.
So on October 6 you complied with John Baird's request, and the city had included in that the letter stating that “...no information contained in the Agreement...will be disclosed to any person other than those who have need to review the Agreement for the sole purpose of the internal review by the Treasury Board”.
That was on October 6. On October 10, John Baird went to the media. He didn't go to the city. He went to the media and said that he had found in the contract the provision that allowed the contract to be extended past the election date.
Your understanding, if I'm correct, was that they wanted to see the contract to see if due diligence was being done. Instead, Mr. Baird got access to confidential contract information and basically dropped a political cluster bomb in the middle of the campaign.
Were you surprised by his actions?