A dispute over whether a retired OPP detective is too biased to be an expert witness for the prosecution has stalled the criminal trial of two former Dalton McGuinty aides for two days.

Defence lawyers argued Monday that Robert Gagnon’s “intimate” involvement in the investigation of allegedly deleted documents in the cancellation of two gas-fired power plants before the 2011 election should disqualify him from giving an opinion about evidence in court.

“It’s like he played for the Montreal Canadiens for 30 years and is coming here to referee a game between the Canadiens and the Leafs,” said Scott Hutchison, acting for former McGuinty deputy chief of staff Laura Miller.

Miller and one-time McGuinty chief of staff David Livingston are charged with breach of trust, mischief in relation to data and misuse of a computer system in the alleged wiping of hard drives in the McGuinty premier’s office before Kathleen Wynne became premier in February 2013.

Livingston, a former investment banker, and Miller have pleaded not guilty and face up to 10 years in prison if convicted of the charges laid almost two years ago.

Gagnon, a forensic computer investigator, was lured out of retirement to work as a technical expert on the case code-named Project Hampden by the OPP.

He was involved in numerous meetings and conference calls about the case with police investigators and the Crown, and went as far as recommending the additional charges of mischief in relation to data, Hutchison said, recapping Gagnon’s testimony from last week.

But Crown attorney Tom Lemon — wearing a tie with the Montreal Canadiens logo on it — told Judge Timothy Lipson that Gagnon should not be disqualified because “this case has a lot of technical issues that require technical advice.”

“A lot of his evidence is factual,” Lemon said of Gagnon, who examined the hard drives of computers in McGuinty’s office that were seized under search warrant from a government storage facility, as well as Blackberries from the accused.

“You always have the discretion to weigh the evidence,” Lemon noted to the judge, who is hearing the case without a jury. Lemon added that the defence will be free to cross-examine Gagnon on any opinions about deleted documents.

Hutchison argued that recent legal precedents require the court to determine in advance whether expert witnesses are admissible to prevent trials from being improperly influenced.

The law is clear that expert witnesses must be “independent and impartial,” Hutchison added.

“It’s telling that he (Gagnon) was hand-picked for the job for the police and remains the expert of choice,” Hutchison said.

“That expertise is widely available outside the police ... there’s no legitimate reason or need to use that witness.”

Lipson said he will issue a ruling on Gagnon’s admissibility Thursday morning.

McGuinty, who has said the plants were scrapped because they were too close to residential areas in Mississauga and Oakville, was not a subject of the police investigation and co-operated with investigators.

Opposition parties insist the government scrapped the plants, which faced community opposition, at a huge cost to taxpayers to save Liberal seats in the 2011 election, which saw McGuinty reduced to a minority.

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The trial began Friday at Old City Hall after a delay of almost two weeks because of defence concerns the Crown was not properly disclosing evidence to the defendants.

It is slated to continue into early November.

Correction – September 29, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled the police’s code name for the case as “Project Hampton.”

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