Wednesday was a good day for our democracy.
In a clear-eyed ruling, Justice Timothy Lipson of the Ontario Court of Justice sentenced David Livingston, a top staffer in the office of former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, to four months in jail for his role in the cover-up of the province’s infamous gas-plant scandal.
Four months isn’t a long sentence, but it comes as a surprise that Mr. Livingston will be spending any time behind bars at all (pending the appeal he launched on Wednesday). It is exceedingly rare for anyone involved in a political scandal to end up in jail.
Mr. Livingston was found guilty in January of ordering government hard drives wiped clean in a 2013 effort to destroy gas-plant records. The former banker was serving as chief of staff to Mr. McGuinty, who left office soon after.
The conviction was a watershed moment in the scandal, establishing that the grossly wasteful, $1.1-billion decision to relocate two unpopular gas plants before an election was followed by a criminal cover-up.
At the time that Mr. Livingston ordered the hard drives scrubbed, a standing committee of the Ontario legislature was expected to continue requesting records relating to the plants from the premier’s office.
As Justice Lipson wrote in giving his reasons for the sentence, Mr. Livingston tried to “thwart the core values of accountability and transparency that are essential to the proper functioning of parliamentary democracy.”
That’s why jail time was warranted here, despite Mr. Livingston’s clean record and admirable career.
This outcome doesn’t undo the damage wrought by Mr. McGuinty’s disastrous handling of the gas-plant file. Although he was never under investigation in the matter, his flight from public life when the scandal was at its height was timed to avoid political accountability. He walked away, while Mr. Livingston was led out of court in handcuffs.
What the sentence does, though, is send an important message. Democracies cannot function properly without public accountability, and those who deliberately undermine it deserve harsh punishment.