Boxes of documents at Library and Archives Canada's consultation room in Ottawa in June, 2025.Justin Tang/The Globe and Mail
Bill Waiser is a Saskatoon-based historian.
There were bonfires behind the Saskatchewan Legislature on the night of June 15, 1944. Earlier that day, the upstart Co-operative Commonwealth Federation Party had stormed to victory in the provincial election, and the defeated Liberal government responded by destroying papers and files in burning barrels. Not a single government document – except for two pages missed in the commotion – survived the culling.
The extent of the document purge was not fully appreciated until the new CCF administration found empty filing cabinets in government offices. New premier Tommy Douglas was furious. The first few weeks after the election were chaotic, Mr. Douglas recalled, but what made it worse was not having access to government records “in order to pick up where somebody has left off.”
When Liberal prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King asked Mr. Douglas about the agenda for an upcoming dominion-provincial conference, the latter sheepishly replied, “What meeting?”
Mr. Douglas resolved that this “act of pillage” would never happen again. The destruction of public documents went against Canadian history and public accountability – and he wanted to make it illegal. So in 1945, the CCF government established the Saskatchewan Archives Board (now known as the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan), giving it legislated authority to select and preserve official records of enduring value for Saskatchewan history.
Eighty years later, the history of Canada is once again under siege. That might sound alarmist, but today’s critical archival challenges are all too real.
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Government departments and agencies now produce and collect a wealth of information in a wide variety of digital formats, from e-mails to data banks to photos and video – but there is no guarantee that these records are complete or will be accessible in the future.
Without the systematic digital management of these records, including their continuing preservation in accessible formats, Canada’s history is going to be lost or, at best, incomplete: unintelligible, inaccessible or inauthentic.
It’s vital to “know ourselves,” as Tom Symons titled his landmark 1975 Canadian Studies report, as we navigate an uncertain future. Imagine the frustration if records about residential schools, the Great War Expeditionary Force, the Canadian census or even The Globe and Mail were archived in an electronic format that can’t be read today.
The other challenge in dealing with electronic records is deciding what to keep for tomorrow. Unlike analog records, which can sit for decades before being evaluated for possible archival retention, decisions about what digital records need to be preserved must be made today because of their ephemeral nature.
But at all government levels, Canada doesn’t have sufficient archival resources – in terms of both expert staff and technology – to acquire and process the massive volume of e-records created by an enlarged public service over the past two decades.
Government accountability and transparency are supposed to be served through the federal Access to Information Act and provincial and territorial freedom of information legislation. But if the completeness and accessibility of digital records are in doubt, how can democratically elected governments be answerable to the public?
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Access officers, including several information commissioners of Canada, have repeatedly cautioned that they can’t meet their mandate without more funding and more staff. That’s only going to get worse. In responding to the Carney government’s order to cut spending, Library and Archives Canada is proposing to reduce the number of staff who deal with access requests. Researchers can expect even longer wait times, stretching into years.
All governments use the rhetoric of transparency and accountability, but the reality is a political and bureaucratic culture in which the default is secrecy, as documented by the recent Globe series, “Secret Canada.” There is no better example than Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s recent move to exempt him and his cabinet from freedom of information requests.
But not all leaders viewed access to government records as a problem. When the provincial archivist at the time informed Mr. Douglas that all his official papers were going to be made available, he said he hoped the complete record would lead to a robust assessment of his CCF government.
Reliable records and access to those records (balanced against real privacy concerns) are at the heart of government accountability.
Canada needs a well-funded records management system and archival and library infrastructure that can deal with both the challenges and opportunities of the digital world. We also need to update access to information legislation to take into account the new record-keeping realities of the digital world. Failing to act would be like allowing government records to go up in flames, once again.