OTTAWA—The office of International Co-operation Minister Julian Fantino insists it never knew partisan letters would be posted to a government website despite newly released documents suggesting they were kept in the loop.

A series of opinion pieces and letters to the editor appeared on the Canadian International Development Agency website on Jan. 12, including two letters that contained partisan statements attacking the New Democrats and the Liberals.

Those two letters — titled “Liberals make promises, Conservatives get results”, which originally appeared in the National Post, and “Dear NDP: CIDA does not need your economic advice,” originally published in the Huffington Post — were ordered removed Jan. 15 after they became a source of controversy.

At the time, Fantino’s office said the letters were posted by mistake to the taxpayer-funded government website by officials.

Documents the Star obtained through a request under the Access to Information Act appear to contradict that version of events, but a spokeswoman for Fantino stuck to the explanation Thursday.

“CIDA was asked to add appropriate web content. Two items were posted by officials in error. CIDA was asked to remove them immediately and they did,” Meagan Murdoch said in an emailed statement Thursday.

The documents show that on Jan. 3, Jo-Ann Purcell, a senior departmental assistant in the office of the CIDA president who acts as a liaison between the public service side of the agency and Fantino’s office, wrote an email about the nine opinion pieces to be posted online.

“Can you let me know what format/section of CIDA’s website these will be posted on? If possible, can you send a mock-up before posting all of them?” Purcell wrote.

The rest of the email was redacted according to the section of the Access to Information Act that allows government departments to withhold information about advice or recommendations to cabinet ministers, as well as consultations or deliberations that involve cabinet ministers or their staff.

Subsequent emails about translations and timelines include references to the minister’s office — referred to in bureaucratic shorthand as OMINE — including another one from Purcell on Jan. 12 letting senior officials at CIDA know the opinion posted has been posted that day.

“All have been posted on CIDA’s website. Omine aware,” Purcell wrote in an email to senior agency officials, including Margaret Biggs, president of CIDA.

Purcell included a link to the updated page in her email.

On Thursday, both Murdoch and CIDA said officials never ended up sending the list of titles to be posted to Purcell or the minister’s office.

“A mock-up was requested in advance by the minister’s office, but was not provided,” CIDA spokesman Nicolas Doire wrote in an emailed statement Thursday.

“The minister’s office was not asked to approve the selection of op-eds before they were posted. Upon becoming aware of the error, CIDA was asked by the minister’s office to immediately remove the letters,” Doire wrote.

The package released to the Star also details the fallout from the partisan letters being discovered by the media and opposition.

“Please advise as soon as all the links are down,” Purcell wrote Jan. 15.

André Frenette, a director general at CIDA, also got involved.

“We need to send a message on Twitter that says that the messages were posted by mistake and have been taken off. Our priority is to get the messages of the web and then a message on Twitter,” Frenette wrote Jan. 15.

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Emails sent the next day were about answering multiple requests from the media on the issue, which went through an approval process at the Privy Council Office.

The documents also suggest the Privy Council Office wanted to know how much Fantino’s office knew about the situation, and when.

“We also need the email that was sent to the minister’s office advising them of the posting on Saturday,” Christiane Fox, director of strategic communications in the Privy Council Office wrote in an email on Jan. 16.

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