The link between access to information and government accountability should be fairly obvious. When the machinery of government is plain and open, and the flow of dollars and decisions easily tracked, accountability is enhanced. Deniability becomes impossible.
On the other hand, a lack of open access enables a culture of secrecy. A culture of secrecy allows corruption and incompetence to breed. This can costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, as in the Sponsorship Scandal, or lead to the deaths of hundreds, as did the tainted blood scandal.
This makes some stories that have been coming our in recent weeks all the more important. This week, Globe and Mail reporter Gloria Galloway called Ottawa’s access to information system “Kafkaesque”. Requests that should be filled in 30 days take two years or more, and even then the material received is heavily redacted.
To make matters worse, the more sensitive a file, the more elaborate and bold the reasons for denial and excuses for delay.
CAIRS – the Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System – which had been used to track what requests for information have been made to the government, was quietly shut down in 2008 and has not been replaced.
It isn’t a problem just in Ottawa, either. The B.C. government was slammed by the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Clinic and a public advocacy group called the Dogwood Initiative for “long delays in answering information requests, high fees and rampant censorship of documents.”
In Alberta, there was a court ruling telling the provincial Information and Privacy Commissioner to stop issuing routine extensions in its investigations.
It wasn’t always this way.
Two decades ago, when the legislation was passed, there was a lot of enthusiasm. Most requests for information were processed quickly and efficiently
Of course, there were some naysayers. Requests were expected to grow to the point that departments wouldn’t be able to keep up.
They were partly right as, indeed, government agencies across Canada now claim they cant keep up with requests. But it isn’t because there are more requests.
Requests to the federal government have stayed steady at near 15,000 per year for some time. In B.C., they’ve actually fallen 57%. The reason? People are giving up.
Many commentators, if not all, are quick to point the finger the current governments involved. There is something to this: elected officials set the tone for government. In Ottawa, nobody could accuse Stephen Harper of being laissez-faire with communications. The current spat with Parliament over the Afghan detainee documents provides an example, as does Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s refusal to make any improvements to the access to information law.
There’s plenty of motive: politicians love “conditional accountability”, in which they get credit for good news, but not for bad. The way to ensure that is to see that bad news never makes it to the top.
But the roots of the problem run much deeper.
Few people realize that the access to information laws were passed over the protests of senior bureaucrats – who have always been strongly opposed. And, while governments come and go, they have been working quietly to subvert the letter and spirit of access laws. Access, you see, leads to the disclosure of uncomfortable truths.
They’ve done so in many ways – some deliberate and some accidental. The most obvious deliberate act has been the abuse of exemptions and the shift away from recording decisions and advice. Meetings are routinely held where there are no minutes – at best, there might be a list of headings – even when important decisions are made.
The second thing that’s been done is under-staffing access to information processing units. By doing this, they create unavoidable delays. It’s like narrowing a highway from three lanes to one.
Another barrier to access to information has received almost no press, but I think it might be one of the most important. Information management has collapsed in the government since the 1980s. Filing systems are laughable. This allows departments to claim that it will take outrageous lengths of time (and charge huge fees) to to respond to requests.
How could this have happened? Well, you’ll recall that offices used to have clerks and secretaries. Then came the computer age. In a misguided policy of fiscal restraint, clerks and secretaries were let go. Nobody should have to dictate a letter anymore, it was decided.
As for filing, well, nobody in authority really thought about it. One supposes that, in their ignorance, they imagined a technology fix would appear to solve the problem. But one didn’t, and now bureaucracies are spinning their wheels, spouting rhetoric about knowledge management and corporate memory problems as if they appeared overnight. And still they don’t seem to understand the huge effort it’s going to take to put filing systems back again. That, and perhaps they don’t want to.
Part of this is cultural, too. Nobody seems to want to have to subject themselves to the rigid processes managing filing systems would require. Some resent being told to conform to the new systems that are starting to appear.
These deliberate and accidental acts are a serious attack on accountability, even democracy, made by unelected officials acting in self-interest and ineptitude. The fact that the attacks have been so drawn out as to be almost unnoticeable (until now, when it appears the systems are in danger of collapsing) does not lessen the responsibility of bureaucrats or politicians. They have all allowed this to happen in a series of tiny decisions, and should all be called to account.
Calling politicians to account, of course, is fairly easy to do. We have elections. But what about bureaucrats? How can they be brought into line?
The answer, in my humble opinion, is easy to write but not to execute: make access to information a Constitutional right, pass laws that require government business to be recorded, and attach penalties to violations.
In the current environment, however, that’s not likely to happen. Canadians, it seems, will have to wait for governments that care about accountability and transparency. Or perhaps it’s Canadians who don’t care. In which case, they have nothing to complain about when the next scandal hits.
