Hydro smear attempt alleged

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This article was published 23/02/2010 (5900 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A hydro consultant turned whistleblower claims Manitoba Hydro has launched a campaign to discredit her findings that the Crown corporation lost more than $1 billion over the last five years and could face bankruptcy and blackouts.

She was responding to an affidavit recently filed in Court of Queen’s Bench as part of a civil suit by Hydro to force some public airing of the whistleblower’s findings.

“Hydro has purposefully tried to issue a smear campaign by not including both sides of the communications,” she said in an email. “Hydro clearly is desperate to besmirch me using one-sided comments.”

The affidavit by David Cormie, Manitoba Hydro’s manager of power sales and operations, claims the whistleblower based her findings on a deeply flawed understanding of Hydro’s operations, missed many deadlines and claimed she foresaw the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

The whistleblower cannot be named because of a publication ban.

Hydro has filed 82 exhibits, including dozens of internal letters and covert emails sent by the whistleblower to Hydro insiders. The emails range from apparent light-hearted joking about duck hunting to insistent demands for information.

Cormie’s affidavit says she also hounded Hydro staff for data and joked in emails about wishing the company’s current risk manager would commit suicide.

The emails suggest the whistleblower planned to simply “overwrite” the risk manager she was assigned by Hydro to work with, calling him a “non-person” who would soon be roadkill and joking about him hanging in the bathroom.

The whistleblower said many comments attributed to her were made as casual jokes.

“The affidavit regarding the work performed is flat-out false and can be proven as such,” she said in an email. “Hydro’s behaviour is a desperate attempt to distort facts and they stoop to new lows to undermine the allegations and my risk credibility, and are taking jokes out of context which have nothing to do with the review and the risks that were uncovered.”

Hydro has already hired accountants KPMG to scrutinize the whistleblower’s findings. Hydro wants to be allowed by the court to release the KPMG report to outside investigators, regulators and possibly the public. The affidavit says that by late 2006, Cormie ordered staff to stop providing the consultant with data and halted payments to her. Hydro and the consultant parted ways in September 2008.