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Emails recovered by police on seized computers from the McGuinty premiers office expose feverish and sometimes comical damage control efforts by Liberals scrambling to contain fallout from the gas plants scandal.

In the summer and fall of 2012, top officials to then-premier Dalton McGuinty were trying to downplay opposition estimates of the cost to axe power plants in Mississauga and Oakville before the 2011 election.

The emails, revealed in a 131-page OPP search warrant application, are peppered with the lingo of professional spin doctors.

One missive from former McGuinty deputy chief of staff Laura Miller centres on the hotly disputed cancellation costs that would later balloon from the $180 million first floated by the minority Liberal government.

We . . . need to pivot to the fact that the opposition said it would cost a billion to settle at the time, Miller wrote to several colleagues on July 11, 2012, three months before McGuinty announced his pending resignation and suspended the legislature mired in an uproar over the scandal.

Ironically, 14 months later, auditor general Bonnie Lysyk put the costs of cancelling the two plants and relocating them to Napanee and Sarnia at up to $1.1 billion over 20 years.

Looking for after-the-fact justifications for cancelling the Mississauga gas plant in the dying days of the election campaign, senior Liberal political staff exchanged a flurry of emails regarding the cancellation of the Mississauga gas plant.

There were questions as to whether the government had any standards on how far power plants should be located from residential areas.

My only concern about using the setback numbers is it appears (the Ministry of) Energy cant get any numbers right. EVER, Leon Korbee, a former TV reporter who now serves as a senior adviser to Premier Kathleen Wynne, wrote to Miller and other colleagues on July 16, 2012.

Former McGuinty communications director Wendy McCann, a veteran Canadian Press reporter, also cautioned against using any setback numbers at all.

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Liberals tried to downplay fallout over gas plants, documents show