Police refute claim they asked province to keep a lid on information breach

A Halifax police superintendent has seriously undermined the province's defence for not immediately warning thousands of Nova Scotians that their personal information had been stolen.

Senior bureaucrats, as well as Internal Services Minister Patricia Arab, told reporters early Wednesday afternoon the province held off on going public for six days at the request of police who were concerned the warning would impede their investigation into the matter.

"Honestly, we wanted the person responsible for this to not know that we knew this had happened," Arab said. "We needed to let Halifax Regional [Police] do their job and couldn't compromise the nature of their investigation."

Arab refined that answer when questioned by reporters later.

"It wasn't a direct order; it was, sorry, I can't think of the word. They, yeah, it would help them. The longer we could hold off, the better it would be for them to move forward on their investigation," Arab said.

"And we didn't want to do anything to impede that investigation because it was critical in the containment process of our protocol process."

But at a mid-afternoon news conference, Halifax police Supt. Jim Perrin told reporters a different story.

Responding to whether police asked the province to refrain from informing the public, Perrin said: "No, no, we were first contacted by the province on the weekend. My division took this file over later on the weekend and thankfully it went fairly quickly and we laid the charge."

Asked whether the province letting people know immediately would have compromised the investigation, Perrin was noncommittal. 

"It's hard to say. But there was no conversation between us and the province about holding off and not telling anybody."

Damage control

By Thursday, both Arab and McNeil were choosing their words carefully, emphasizing the fact the province made the decision to withhold the information, after consulting with police. 

"Halifax Regional Police did not give us the directive to withhold that information," said the premier. "We came to that conclusion in conversations that the longer [police] had to be able to identify the individual and capture the hardware, the better chance we had, not only to contain the information but to make sure that if the individual did share it we'd have as much of the hardware possible to find out where that went."

McNeil called it "nonsensical" to suggest his government tried to place responsibility for the secrecy on the police force.

Arab also took issue with claim by police there were no discussions about keeping the breach secret.

"I just know that my security staff had ongoing conversations with the Halifax police, and then through advice from my senior staff we decided to make the very difficult decision to hold off and allow that process to take its course," she told reporters.

NDP leader Gary Burrill said the discrepancy between what police said and the government's original position was a serious matter.

"I think it calls into question the trustworthiness of the government's word," he said. 

Interim PC Leader Karla MacFarlane went further, accusing McNeil and Arab of having "absolutely misled" Nova Scotians.

"I think what people want, they want to be notified first," she said.