Until now, Premier Christy Clark's promise to have the most open, transparent government in the country has been mostly pretense. And so her new vow to tear down the walls of secrecy that have been erected around her administration will have to be accepted with reservation.
The Premier said on Wednesday she would act on all the recommendations contained in a new report by former B.C. privacy commissioner David Loukidelis aimed at ensuring sensitive government records are maintained for public inspection, and not destroyed, something that had become common practice in the Clark administration.
"I'm hoping that by doing what has been recommended it means we'll be back in the forefront of open and transparent government," Ms. Clark told reporters in a teleconference call. "We didn't keep up and need to fix it."
What Mr. Loukidelis provided the government was a blueprint of how to enact a raft of proposals emanating from an earlier investigation by Information and Privacy czar Elizabeth Denham into the government's lousy information accountability record.
That document, entitled Access Denied, was a scathing indictment of the culture of deceit and evasion that had grown across ministries and included Ms. Clark's own office. This ethos included the custom of routinely "triple deleting" potentially incriminating e-mails to ensure they were permanently scrubbed from the government computer system.
That is a habit that now comes to an end, if Ms. Clark is to be believed. It is forever banned and those caught violating this rule will be sanctioned; what penalty awaits such people is unknown. This would seem to indicate that even Transportation Minister Todd Stone will have to comply with the new edict, after famously saying he would not abide by Ms. Denham's order that this habit be stopped.
The Premier also said a legislative committee will review "duty to document" recommendations in both reports from Mr. Loukidelis and Ms. Denham. This concerns the matter of creating a record of conversations and policy-decision correspondence that have formed the basis of any major policy initiative.
The absence of any substantive records surrounding policy decisions has been a particularly troubling aspect of the Clark administration. Ms. Denham found that political staffers, including those in the Premier's office, were deleting their e-mails, or consigning sensitive correspondence to Post-it notes that could be read and subsequently tossed in the garbage. Now, it would seem, government aides and various officials will at least have to make an attempt at documenting correspondence, although everyone, I'm sure, will be encouraged to make those records as benign and uncontroversial as possible.
Of course, the larger question is: will any of this incite real, substantive change? Are the public and media apt to now get piercing insights into how major decisions have come about, get access to the heretofore private thoughts of the Premier or cabinet ministers? I would say that is highly doubtful.
These new rules might produce more of a paper trail when it comes to actions or decisions that may have preceded some government announcement. But as I said, political aides and others are going to be urged to be especially cautious about anything they put down on paper or in an e-mail that could be the subject of a Freedom of Information request. They will also be advised, if they haven't been already, to never put anything down in writing that they wouldn't want seen plastered all over the news.
At the end of the day, all the privacy commissioner or the public at large can expect and hope is that our civil servants, when introduced to these new policies, will do the right thing. Mr. Loukidelis admitted as much himself, saying all you can really do is "trust" people. "To have individuals looking over the shoulders of each public servant to ensure that they are making the right judgment is just not possible," he said.
And he's right. One of the recommendations is that the privacy commissioner launch surprise spot checks in ministry offices to see if the new rules are being complied with. That's not a bad idea. However, that's unlikely to stop the dozens of conversations that take place every day in government, in offices, on the phone, via text message, that have always escaped public scrutiny and will continue to.
There is no such thing as a truly open government – and never will be.