Ken Rubin is an Ottawa-based public-interest researcher, freedom-of-information user and critic, author and organic farmer.
Canada’s access-to-information system is broken, weighed down by long delays, numerous complaints and low international ratings.
But Canadian authorities think the preventive disclosure system is doing just fine as intended.
After nearly six decades of government inquiries, I can confirm that bureaucrats, politicians, corporate and law-enforcement officials just want all the secrecy protections they have and more, the public be damned.
In my case, that’s meant, both before and after Canada passed access legislation in 1982, persisting and requesting well over 100,000 secret items, some of which ended up as front-page stories.
Let me give you some examples of the information delay/denial system at work that I have recently experienced. First off, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada gave me a three-year time extension on my request for records on the specific regional job benefits claimed for the most expensive multibillion-dollar project in Canadian history, with the Parliamentary Budget Office now warning about even higher costs coming for building and maintaining combat naval warships.
More than three years later, I haven’t received any records and I’d wager the government and the contractor, Irving Shipbuilding, would like it that way. Besides, there may not be as many regional benefits as claimed.
Secondly, I sought records more than four years ago on behalf of Canadian academic Hassan Diab regarding the RCMP’s long involvement in his surveillance and unjust extradition, including its involvement in his 2014 extradition to France. The RCMP, which is notoriously poor at providing access, appears to have no real interest in releasing anything and likely can cite all kinds of exemptions if needed, allowing them to cough up mainly blank pages.
In addition, on behalf of several national environment groups, I asked Natural Resources Canada more than 2½ years ago for their records on how they decided to exclude certain industries’ lucrative projects from having to do environmental impact assessments, like they did for the controversial small nuclear reactors now under development with significant federal funding and loans. Despite the environment groups’ petitioning the Auditor-General in 2021 for this and more information, nothing has been forthcoming.
When it comes to residential school records, people who seek access are kept waiting. Maybe it’s because they cannot find the records, but it’s more likely got to do with their reluctance to want to quickly release records that lead to many questions and legal claims.
No one is exempt from this 40-year bureaucratic nightmare of an access system. The only recent complaint I put in with the Information Commissioner has taken five years to get an investigation under way. If the records sought are not found and were not kept, there is not much that office can do.
Politicians and bureaucrats have always found ways of increasing secrecy, starting with the cabinet confidentiality system.
When I applied for and received hundreds of cabinet discussion papers after the Access to Information Act’s implementation, the response was to never again produce the factual details as a stand-alone accessible document.
When calls came more recently for access to information coverage from the Prime Minister’s Office and other ministers’ offices, including from Justin Trudeau himself, the legislated response in 2019 was to legally exclude those offices forever from public access. Ingeniously and cynically, the legislation allows for a few ministerial handouts under a new legal exclusion regime called “pro-active disclosure.”
When it comes to establishing a real system of pro-actively releasing health, safety, consumer and environmental records promptly, authorities take the opposite tack and bury or destroy them. Take for instance, meat-inspection safety records, which I fought for years to access so the public could get them. The reports and government inspections are no longer done as it’s up to companies to self-police, though their records are inaccessible.
If Canada’s Access to Information Act was really an open government one, there would be millions of users, but there is not. Yet the government claims there is a crisis when requests overall (excluding immigration records) reach more than 150,000. All good bureaucrats then call for more resources and greater empire building, despite already having a $90-million system in play.
But the mandarins still want that system to allow for many exemptions and delays.
There is review upon review of access legislation, but they are not meant to correct secrecy. They are mostly done to enhance secrecy and to keep all the ornate, opaque barriers in place.
I often hear some parliamentary committee being told this is a resource problem while advocating for the continuation of what amounts to a massive unnecessary system of excessive secrecy.
It’s too harmful for Canadians to let this system stand. It’s time for Canada to create a proper right-to-information system that actually does what it is supposed to do and allows the public to know what is happening inside our own governments.