[LINK] "PEI tightens registry access as traffic spikes"

[rfmcdonald]

Oliver Moore at The Globe and Mail let us know about a rather remarkable blogging-related development on Prince Edward Island.

The government of Prince Edward Island moved to tighten access to its corporate registry after a local blogger and tech developer found a way to search by shareholder, sparking a flood of public interest.

About 140,000 searches were done at his site in the first week it was live. Most of them were by locals and roughly one-fifth were by keyword, employing search terms that suggested some people were using the site to check up on politicians.

"You see the Premier's name [being used as a keyword], you see some cabinet ministers' names," Peter Rukavina said.

He said he created the Web-search tool because he was interested in finding out the names of shareholders behind a development project in downtown Charlottetown. It was purely to satisfy his own curiosity. But when he offered the public access to the search tool, it gave everyone the chance to explore who might have had ties to a much-criticized immigrant-investment program.


The amount of traffic was something of a surprise to Mr. Rukavina, who hadn't realized the depth of public interest.

He wasn't the only one surprised. A representative of the corporate registry said officials there had no idea that shareholder data could be so easily retrieved from the site, and they moved quickly to limit access. The added security brought the registry into line with most other provinces, the official said, and enhanced the privacy of its clients.

But it's not just curious members of the public who will be missing the access.

"One of the significant sources of traffic to the site is people within government," Mr. Rukavina said. "Presumably it's more effective than the tool they have at their disposal."

He shut down opencorporations.org yesterday, saying the added security at the corporate registry had made the data stale.

The so-called Provincial Nominee Program has dominated the political chatter in PEI for months. Under the program, thousands of would-be immigrants put up $200,000 in return for being allowed to settle on the island. Most of the money was supposed to be invested locally.

Businesses connected to some politicians are known to have benefited from the program, which Richard Brown, Minister of Innovation and Advanced Learning, has said was not a problem, provided it passed conflict-of-interest rules.

When questioned during the fall about the involvement of politicians, Mr. Brown asked rhetorically: "Are we saying if he owns a farm he is not allowed to apply for farm subsidies?"

The province's auditor-general started a probe in early October, and interest in the story has continued to grow. Among the more recent revelations was that some would-be migrants paid $2,500 to have an interview overseas, and that some of the money was given out as bonuses for staff at the Crown corporation that administered the program.

"This story has more legs than a centipede," said Ian Dowbiggin, chair of the department of history at the University of Prince Edward Island.

He said the story has aroused so much interest in part because of the amount of money involved - hundreds of millions of dollars - and also because the government has released so little information.

"Almost everything that we hear about the program ... is speculation. It's innuendo and rumour," Dr. Dowbiggin said.

"What I am prepared to say is that if even a third of what has been alleged about this program turns out to be true, it will be the biggest scandal in Prince Edward Island history."

Rukavina has more on this situation here. All I can say is that, in a province where people were outraged that an elected government would give jobs out based not on their political affiliation but rather on their qualifications, this sort of scandal is not surprising in the least.