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Pity Citizen Joe. Pity Joe Public.

Whatever else, Ontarians deserved that the gas plants trial be a full and fair hearing, the usual sort of robust contest that a criminal trial in an adversarial system is meant to be.

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Instead, what they got Friday was the theatre of the absurd, with the judge clearly desperate for information that the lawyers (one side pleased as punch about it, the other not) have agreed he can’t have.

In the end, the court was left with roughly this question: If a tree doesn’t fall in the forest and no one sees it not fall did it not fall or not?

This trial, in other words, has become not about evidence, but about the absence of it.

David Livingston and Laura Miller, respectively the former chief of staff and deputy chief of staff to former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, are pleading not guilty to charges of breach of trust and data destruction, all in connection to their alleged deletion of documents about the notorious gas plants.