Oh Canada!
I’ve told you over the last several years about Steven Nowack, a music biz entrepreneur in the who lives in Toronto.
In 2019, despite pleading innocent and mounting a rigorous defense, Nowack was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 9 years in prison, a $16.5 million fine, and a further 7 years in prison if he doesn’t pay the fine within three years. He spent a year in prison in an arbitrary incarceration ordered by Justice Robert F. Goldstein of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
What happened next: In 2021, Nowack and his highly respected lawyer, Paul Slansky, made a shocking discovery: the Toronto Police had claimed in evidence at his trial that they had “systematically deleted” the emails from his investigation. But in 2021, once Nowack had served his time in prison, the TPS came clean and admitted that they had never “systematically deleted” the emails at all. There were 15,731 of these emails, which Nowack was not able to use at his trial to make full answer and defense. They were there all along. The emails quite possibly could have affected the outcome of Nowack’s verdict.
Since that time, Nowack has continued to fight the government — what’s called The Crown in Canada — and come up frustrated. The court system has rebuffed them at every turn.
For the Toronto Police Service, this is maybe the worst scandal they’ve had recently among many. Recently, three of its officers were charged in Barcelona, Spain following what Spanish authorities have described as serious allegations including sexual assault. Seven officers are charged — six serving, one retired, all suspended — in connection with Project South, Canada’s largest active police corruption investigation. And the unsolved murders of Barry and Honey Sherman — among the most prominent Canadians of their generation — remain open after eight years.
This is not a good look for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, or Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
Nowack’s case is now under appeal. For the first time I can report on the evidence that was removed. The 15,731 emails weren’t discovered until 2021. Among them was an email written in 2015 — two years after Nowack’s arrest and four before his trial — by the then prosecutor Stuart Rothman, who doubted privately that Nowack’s case had merit. He conceded that certain records from 8 of Nowack’s “allegedly fraudulent accounts” had not been produced. Rothman wrote:
“Without the records from those eight accounts, the Crown cannot prove that Mr. Nowack did not in fact have hundreds of millions of dollars in those accounts and that he was not really making money for his investors.”
Rothman was soon replaced. Whatever doubts he had about the strength of the case against Nowack were not known to the jury, as that email disappeared into the 15,000 no one knew about. They didn’t surface until 2021, two and a half years after Nowack’s conviction.
The 8 missing accounts? They were never obtained.
The volumes of missing emails in the Nowack case paint a far different picture of the defendant. Would he have been acquitted if the Toronto Police Service had produced the emails before or during the trial? It seems more than possible a jury would have concluded that Nowack was innocent. Nowack was clearly denied the opportunity to defend himself thoroughly.
Rothman did not write his email in a vacuum. Lori Toledano — the Ontario Securities Commission forensic accountant who testified at trial — was copied on every email in this chain. She was there for all of it. She knew about the 8 missing accounts. She knew Rothman said the Crown couldn’t prove the case without them. She then testified at trial about Nowack’s trading records as if the analysis was complete.
There’s more. I’ve been listening to this case since 2013, curious about how the Canadian court system worked. Down here, we have this dream that Canada is a fairy tale, that everything is so much more lawful than in the US.
That turns out to be BS.
It wasn’t until November 2021 that Nowack and Slansky were told by the Toronto Police that they had discovered this massive volume of emails which had been systematically deleted from their system.
Now, in a 2019 email never before seen, Detective Constable Valerie Dahan is shown claiming that she didn’t know how her computer system worked. She claimed in evidence that the Toronto Police Service computer system “systematically deletes” emails after 2.5 years. In fact, the actual stated policy of the Toronto Police is that they “systematically delete” emails after 3.5 years unless a never-delete rule is placed on the emails. Dahan’s claims that the TPS had “systematically deleted” 3.5 years’ worth of email evidence in the Nowack case — which is false — jeopardized Nowack’s right to a fair trial. She wrote to the prosecutor in the case, Renna Weinberg, who’d replaced Rothman:
“Throughout the Steven Nowack investigation, I believed that as the emails were automatically being archived, this resulted in them being safe from deletion. As I did not have a need to access archived emails, I did not realize that as time went on the emails were being systematically deleted.”
Dahan continued:
“I accessed the archived R v NOWACK email folder as well as the current R v NOWACK email folder. At that time, I discovered that the emails had been systematically deleted.”
Since then, for the last seven years, Slansky and Nowack have conducted their own investigations and have only met with stonewalling from the courts. In a new email, also published here for the first time, Alpha Chan, Chief Information Security Officer of the Toronto Police, actually instructs his associate to lie about how the Nowack emails were deleted, when they were not.
Chan wrote:
“Let them dig, but don’t give the directions where to dig. I would remove the ‘and their account and email can be relinquished’ because the next set of questions would be for that chunk. We don’t need to tell them timelines or approval processes right away. All they want to know is if the account is gone, so is the settings.”
The associate replies that he agrees to cover up the truth.
Flash forward to December 2025 and April 2026, when two separate three-judge panels of the Court of Appeal for Ontario — Canada’s second highest court — reviewed all of this evidence, including the Chan email, and found there was no dishonesty by the Toronto Police. The December 2025 panel wrote:
“There is no basis, on this record, to suggest that the TPS, or the prosecuting Crown, was ever anything but honest and open about what they knew at the various times that they advised the trial judge that the emails had been deleted.”
The Chan “let them dig” email was before the court when that finding was made.
PS Why am I writing this? Because Canadian media is afraid to deal with anything even remotely scandalous in their government…
To be continued…
