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Editorial: Make openness the first default

Premier Christy Clark is taking positive steps to foster a culture of openness in her government by putting career civil servants, rather than political staff, in charge of information requests, and by prohibiting employees from triple-deleting email

Premier Christy Clark is taking positive steps to foster a culture of openness in her government by putting career civil servants, rather than political staff, in charge of information requests, and by prohibiting employees from triple-deleting emails.

She could further enhance openness and clarity by ordering government employees to come clean on the firings of Health Ministry workers in 2012, an issue that continues to be plagued by obfuscation and murky answers.

Former privacy commissioner David Loukidelis has made 27 recommendations to improve the government’s record-keeping and freedom-of-information systems. He was hired to help the government respond to a damning report by privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who found evidence that Clark’s political staff had abused the freedom-of-information law by destroying records, conducting negligent searches for records and failing to keep proper records.

Clark said the government accepts all the recommendations, which will put B.C. “back at the forefront of being a really open and transparent government. Because we didn’t keep up and we’ve got to fix it.”

Denham called the ban on triple-deleting emails “an important first step in not only ensuring a permanent record exists, but in restoring public confidence in the access to information process.”

Clearing up the mystery of the Health Ministry firings would do much to restore public confidence. Successive investigations — and investigations of the investigations — have done little to explain why eight people were fired after concerns arose about the handling of Health Ministry data.

The government has acknowledged it was heavy-handed in the firings and has apologized. Employees were exonerated and reinstated. But nobody has revealed who was responsible for such a draconian edict and why it was issued.

Documents related to the issue were released Monday. Although they total hundreds of pages, the documents provide no new insights.

It strains credulity to think that senior officials don’t know what happened. If Clark really wants to improve public confidence in the government’s openness, she should make her measures retroactive.

The premier has pledged to bring in duty-to-document legislation that will require government officials to keep records of key decisions, a welcome change from the “oral government” approached that has too long characterized her administration.

Public access to information is important, but it is only one aspect of Loukidelis’s report. Good information management is essential for the effective operation of all facets of government, he says.

Managing the flow of information these days is a challenge. Policies and procedures lag far behind the massive changes in record-keeping brought by the digital revolution. Electronic communication has resulted in an explosion of documents. The old rules for keeping and handling records don’t work; new rules, procedures and much training will be needed, as Loukidelis points out in his report.

While he makes recommendations concerning the retention of records, he does not recommend preserving every electronic record. The provincial public service receives about 284 million emails each year and sends about 86 million. Retaining all of those files would create an impossibly huge mountain of data.

“It would … be damaging to both public administration and, perversely, freedom of information and privacy,” says Loukidelis. “No one keeps their garbage. Hoarding is not healthy.”

Good information management involves, in part, knowing what to keep and what to throw away. Civil servants need clear directions on what should be retained, and they should have the discretion to make judgment calls.

The B.C. government certainly needs to make technical and procedural changes in managing information, but more important is a change of attitude, of defaulting to openness rather than secrecy, of putting the public good ahead of the party’s welfare.