Dozens of government web pages related to former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s time in office have been removed from all Google search results at the new Liberal government’s request.

In fact, the requests on behalf of the Privy Council Office to remove sites such as Harper’s daily.pm.gc.ca site and the former PMO’s 24seven video website from search results began Nov. 4, 2015 – the day Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was sworn into office.

A few days later, on Nov. 9, 2015, the government asked Google to clear the index for the prime ministerial website pm.gc.ca for any page published prior to Nov. 4, 2015. The request was unsuccessful, however, because Google did not offer that option, according to documents tabled by the government in the House of Commons.

On Jan. 27, 2016, the government asked Google to remove dozens of sites containing Harper’s news releases in English and in French from search results.

Cameron Ahmad, spokesman for Trudeau, insisted the prime minister’s office did not make the request to have the websites related to Harper removed from Google search results and was not aware it had happened.

Christiane Fox, assistant secretary for communications in the Privy Council, said the requests to Google were part of the Privy Council’s standard transition from the Harper government to Trudeau’s. She said the content of Harper’s prime ministerial website was transferred to Library and Archives Canada but did not know whether it was online and available to the public.

Library and Archives has not yet responded to a request from iPolitics but Thursday, Jeremy Wiebe, a PhD history candidate at the University of Waterloo, located some of the archived webpages on the Library and Archives website.

Thursday morning, the Privy Council updated its website to include a link a partial record of Harper’s prime ministerial websites.

In an interview Thursday, Aaron Brindle, head of public affairs for Google Canada, said the request to remove Harper’s websites from Google search results was a case of a webmaster trying to ensure that searches accurately reflected the website’s content – not an attempt to remove websites under the control of someone else from search results.

While the request from the government would have resulted in the search results changing quickly, Brindle said Google’s crawlers would have also have fairly quickly determined that the websites weren’t available and would have made the adjustment automatically.

In fact, Google’s instructions for webmasters who want to use its Remove URLs tool, suggest that making a request to remove a url simply because it is outdated may be a misuse of the tool.

“The URL removal tool is intended as a first step for content that you urgently need blocked – for example, if it contains confidential data that was accidentally exposed,” the company writes on its website. “Using the tool for other purposes might cause problems for your site.”

“Do not use the tool to clean up cruft, like old pages that 404. If you recently changed your site and now have some outdated URL’s in the index, Google’s crawlers will see this as we recrawl your URL’s, and those pages will naturally drop out of our search results. There’s no need to request an urgent update.”

In total, the documents tabled in the House of Commons show the government made 51 requests to Google between November 4, 2015 and March 3, 2016 to remove the government record of Harper’s time in office from its search results.

Attempts to access those url’s produce error messages – regardless of whether you search using Google or a web browser like Safari. Googling “Prime Minister Stephen Harper” and “news releases” leads you to Trudeau’s news releases, which begin the day his government was sworn in.

While government departments generally make the previous government’s news releases available on their websites there is no pointer on the prime minister’s website to archived news releases from any of his predecessors.

A check of an Internet Archive version of Stephen Harper’s prime ministerial website after he took power in 2006 does not include press releases from his predecessors. It is not known if requests were made at the time to remove his predecessor’s web pages from Google search results.

Conservative MP Candice Bergen, who tabled the order paper question asking about government requests to have material removed from search results, said she was “shocked” to learn the government had removed the pages related to Harper’s time in office from Google search results.

“Regardless of what somebody might think of Stephen Harper, Stephen Harper served the Canadian public as a member of parliament and then as prime minister for over 10 years.”

Bergen described the move as “Orwellian” and “censorship”, adding it was “sneaky”, “petty” and “not transparent.”

Bergen said she wants to know who decided to request the Harper pages be removed from search results and whether there was political direction behind the move.

Fox could not explain why some of the requests to Google to remove Harper era websites from search results were made in November at the time of the transition and dozens of others were only made in January.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May was critical of the decision to remove Harper’s web pages from search results.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate. There’s a new government and I think people who want to google things in our past should be able to google things in our past.”

While the majority of the government’s requests to Google to remove web pages from search results concerned Harper, the documents tabled in the House of Commons reveal a handful of other requests as well.

For example, the RCMP made five requests to Google to remove information from websites, from removing names in a new release after a publication ban was imposed to removing the names of people whose warrants were cancelled or charges were withdrawn.

In April, the Department of National Defence asked Google to clear an older version of a document from its cache that contained personal information of a Canadian Armed Forces member.

Treasury Board turned to Google when it discovered in April that Google searches paired the photo of Bill Matthews, comptroller general of Canada, with biographical information related to Bill Matthews, former MP from Newfoundland. Google addressed the issue to ensure that the photo and the bio no longer appear together in Google searches.

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Here’s the government’s answer to the question placed on the Order Paper by Conservative MP Candice Bergen. The requests to remove the Harper pages from Google search results are outlined on pages 19-22.