The Ministry of the Environment will delete its employees’ chats

The Quebec Ministry of the Environment will delete messages exchanged by its officials on the Teams platform, two months after a controversy, - has learned. The big cleaning will take place on January 15 and will be repeated every month. This fall, the ministry was at the center of a controversy when the contents of chats criticizing the management of the Northvolt file were made public.

According to our information, ministry employees were notified last week. Other ministries have not issued such a directive to their officials.

The Quebec Environmental Law Center (CQDE) wonders what is the Ministry of the Environment trying to hide? He judges the decision very worrying and denounces a massive digital shredding operation.

Chats on Teams have taken a very important place in the daily life of the civil service since the pandemic, with the generalization of teleworking. Very often, these messages have replaced the exchange of emails.

In addition to exchanging confidential information, public service employees discuss everything and nothing with their colleagues.

Except that, in the same way as emails, these messages are subject to the Law on access to documents held by public bodies. They can be seized by a court request. This is what happened at the beginning of the fall in the Northvolt case.

The CQDEwhich is contesting before the Superior Court several ways of doing things by the ministry in the analysis and authorization of the mega-battery factory, obtained chats from officials. The latter criticized the political management of the Northvolt issue on Teams and complained of pressure to accept the project.

We are trying at all costs to make the project acceptable when it is not. […] It’s not transparent and it’s a little crooked.

The general director of CQDE Geneviève Paul is convinced that the decision to delete the chats is linked to the Northvolt file.

This is really worryingshe said, because These are the revelations that shed light on what is really happening within the ministry..

We are depriving the population of very relevant information for thousands of other issues.

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- asked the Ministry of the Environment if its decision to delete conversation history is linked to this controversy. He didn’t confirm it, but he didn’t deny it either, instead choosing to ignore the question.

On the other hand, spokesperson Marjorie Larouche explained to us that Since the ministry’s move to the SharePoint and Office 365 environment, no automatic retention or deletion rules have been applied due to the speed of deployment required to support remote activities.

“Ephemeral” messages

She adds that, In an organization, data retention schedules provide guidance on how long documents should be retained and ensure that documents are not retained indefinitely if they are no longer needed.

MS Teams Conversation (or Chat) messaging is a dynamic tool for exchanging information. It is designed to handle transient (ephemeral) information. This is not a place to save documents for future use or long-term retention.

The retention rule also helps reduce storage space requirementsalso says the ministry.

Geneviève Paul du CQDE think that in the coming days, people will multiply requests for access to information to have access to exchanges before they disappear.