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David Livingston, the former right-hand man to Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, has been criminally convicted of two charges in the deliberate destruction of documents in the notorious gas plants case.

Ontario Court Judge Tim Lipson announced the convictions Friday, reading most of his scathing decision aloud to a packed house at Toronto’s Old City Hall courthouse.

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It was a decision redolent with ordinary man common sense — that if a thing looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

In this instance, Lipson said that what looked for all the world like a sneaky attempt to indiscriminately destroy documents possibly “dangerous” to the Liberal government was borne out by “compelling circumstantial evidence.”

Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post

Essentially, what Lipson found was that what the now 65-year-old Livingston actually did — quietly arranging for unprecedented access to all the computers in the premier’s office, lying by omission to the top civil servant that this was indeed what he was after, then getting the boyfriend of a deputy to come in and wipe about 20 hard drives, not to mention Livingston’s decided fixation with deleting emails and leaving no records behind — defied the benign explanations offered by defence lawyers.