Governments are obsessed these days with amassing information, openly or surreptitiously, on their subjects or those of other countries.
They’re also obsessed with keeping secrets from the public on the assumption that their release would be damaging to the affairs of state or the public interest — which usually means embarrassing to governments.
We all know that the affairs of state involve some pretty shady deals and that governments think they alone can define the public interest.
What’s called freedom of information in some jurisdictions isn’t free at all: It can cost a lot in time and money. What’s called access to information, as in the Canadian statute, is a misleading enticement.
When that piece of legislation was introduced in the House of Commons, Pierre Trudeau declared that even before it became law, all government departments and agencies should act in its “spirit.”
Accordingly, I submitted a request for the prime minister’s daily appointments agenda. The reply was soon in coming: The PMO was not covered by the bill.
“Nice try,” Trudeau scrawled under his signature. So much for the spirit of a law that was supposed to improve the transparency of government.
Brian Mulroney, that master of hyperbole, declared on the eve of his first election, that government files would be open “overnight” when he assumed office. They weren’t, of course, and the bureaucracy was locked away from public view even more than it had been.
Even when the bureaucracy took its obligations seriously, politicians made a joke of them.
Michael Wilson, as finance minister, refused to sign the release of documents approved for release by his deputy. Wilson claimed that the papers must have been blown off his desk by “a big wind.”
The delaying and denial of access has continued under successive governments. Suzanne Legault, the current information commissioner, said last month that there are “unmistakable signs of significant deterioration” in the system in the last year.
She reported that on many occasions, federal departments aren’t responding to requests within 30 days as the law requires or indicating that they need more time to handle them. It can take as long as three years for departments to acknowledge requests.
Harper campaigned, as honestly as his predecessors, to bring in open government as prime minister. Legault says flatly that his government is “breaching the law.”
Our information watchdog can bark, but she can’t bite. She can’t enforce deadlines or impose penalties.
It has been difficult enough to convince those who make policies and those whose job it is to carry them out that they should also be keeping the public aware of what they’re doing. It isn’t, naturally, in their job descriptions.
And providing the personnel and resources to conform to a law that so often is regarded as a nuisance is probably a pretty low priority.
The veil of secrecy is pulled closest in the seat of democracy on Parliament Hill, where senators and MPs think that they’re entitled to spend taxpayers’ money in a way that they think to be no business of taxpayers.
Well, guess what? As the outrage over Senate expenses and allowances scandal shows, the public is demanding more accountability, even for trivial misdemeanours. The public interest is proclaiming itself, as it should. It can no longer be dictated by governments.
We might ask, in that spirit, why the government is spying on mining authorities in Brazil on behalf of Canadian corporations with financial interests there.
We might ask why the president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is in on talks between federal and Alberta officials to set up a joint oilsands monitoring program when no other non-government representative is.
We might ask what government scientists know that we’re not entitled to know.
We might ask why the government is planning to spend $4.2 billion on an operation centre for Communications Security Establishment Canada, which is one of the Five Eyes of a global spying network.
If we ask these questions, we’ll be told by a government that over-classifies information that some things must be kept secret for our own security, that truth doesn’t make us free.
Big Brother bears watching.
