Our two aborted gas-fired power plants will never produce a single kilowatt of power, but they still generate electrical shocks that jolt the governing Liberals.

Unplugging those two gas plants has proved financially costly.

Erasing the email trail has proved even more politically costly.

Sensitive messages were illegally deleted by Liberal staffers. And in the politics of power, the coverup is worse than the cancellation.

Bad enough that the auditor general laid out a narrative of costly incompetence and opportunism in the Mississauga gas plant cancellation.

Now the information and privacy commissioner has condemned even more egregious misdeeds and misdemeanours by two former chiefs of staff. Both of these officials set out to scrub their offices of any emails that could shed light on their conduct — or misconduct.

Wednesday’s report by the information commissioner is the more disturbing of the two reports in this tale of two Ontario watchdogs. Beyond incompetence, it chronicles a culture of wilful defiance by two powerful political operators:

David Livingston ran the premier’s office under Dalton McGuinty until they both left government last February. Craig MacLennan was chief of staff to Energy Minister Chris Bentley before they both resigned (he also served Bentley’s predecessor, Brad Duguid.)

We’ve known for a few months that MacLennan deliberately erased any trace of embarrassing email correspondence between himself and his political bosses. His defiance of government rules that require the archiving of official correspondence prompted an NDP complaint to the commissioner.

During her investigation, she stumbled upon another kind of coverup: Ontario’s chief civil servant, Peter Wallace, told her that in the dying days of the McGuinty government he’d been asked by Livingston for advice on how to clean out emails from computers in the premier’s office.

Who knew that a gas plant cancellation, code-named “Project Vapour” would culminate with vapourized emails?

A generation ago, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon tried to explain a mysterious 18 and a half minute gap on secret White House tapes as an accidental deletion by his loyal private secretary, Rose Mary Woods. She even re-enacted the erasure, showing how she had one foot on a dictation pedal while reaching over and accidentally deleting the conversation everyone wanted to hear.

Fast forward to the Queen’s Park circus, circa 2011-13. The two chiefs of staff didn’t re-enact their deletion deeds, but tried to explain them away.

Livingston said he merely wanted to clear out computer files to make way for the incoming Kathleen Wynne government at a time of transition. MacLennan implied his strategic deletions were merely routine hard drive housekeeping.

Information commissioner Ann Cavoukian reached a different conclusion in her report, entitled “Deleting Accountability: Records Management Practices of Political Staff.” With tens of thousands of emails and missives produced by the bureaucracy and the Ontario Power Authority, how was it that no trace existed of emails between MacLennan and his political bosses? And why was there no electronic trail tied to Livingston on the gas plant sagas?

“This failure to comply with the records retention requirements . . . assists in explaining the apparent paucity of documents relating to the gas plant closures produced by the offices of the former minister of energy and the former premier,” Cavoukian wrote.

Does a chief of staff have a unique job description that empowers him or her to bypass the rules that bind everyone else? Is there an expectation that the chief protects the boss at all costs, even if that means taking a bullet, killing an email folder — or buying a senator’s silence?

Is that why Nigel Wright, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff, believed he could quietly cut a cheque to Mike Duffy, allowing the embattled senator to reimburse improper expenses and thus dodge a full audit?

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It doesn’t have to be that way. When a discombobulated Rob Ford made improper demands on his then-chief, Mark Towhey, he refused — prompting the mayor to sack him, according to the Star’s sources. Towhey lost his position, but not his principles.

That’s a lesson all chiefs of staff, new and old, right and left, need to consider as they wield power: One day, whether in office or after the fact, they may well have to account for their actions — and deletions.

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