Canadian Media Audits Government’s Access to Information Practices

Eighty-nine reporters from 45 Canadian newspapers teamed up to audit various Canadian governments’ access and transparency practices — and found them sadly wanting. It’s a model worldwide media could emulate in the interests of every honest citizen’s human rights and advantage.

The shortcomings the Canadian papers found were less a problem of law, long entrenched, than of bureaucratic arrogance. But the project unmasked the fact that progressive Canada has nothing to be smug about, and sent a message to politicians and officialdom alike that they should take the matter seriously if they expect to be re-elected or keep their jobs.

Access to public information is fundamental to good governance. It is a keystone of government transparency and democracy. And human rights suffer, often piteously, where it is not in place and tended conscientiously. Alas, among the 53 nation members of the Commonwealth, few have a good record and none can be considered even approaching perfection.

Thus, in human rights terms, the pressure to achieve acceptable performance by governments in making available public information they accumulate is a fight that must be waged at all levels. Pressure for access must be continuous and unrelenting on those officials and organisation we, as citizens, pay to serve us. In Canada, one of the most progressive Commonwealth members in this regard, all levels of governments are always under pressure to open their books to the public. And the media, as the public’s surrogate, makes constant demands, which frequently unveil political shortcomings and even malfeasance.

Usually these pressures come from individual reporters and papers. The concerted effort mounted in this examination had the clout of numbers. It produced withering anecdotes and statistics that shamed performances by the federal, provincial and municipal government and even agencies like the police, specially charged with serving the interests of individuals.

“The public’s right to government information that has impact on our lives is in failing health, and will get worse unless we start fixing it,” said Anne Kothawala, president and CEO of the Canadian Newspapers Association, which launched the project. “This is documentary evidence of something that newspapers have long suspected to be a fact.”

Over a two-month period, the 89 writers, acting as interested citizens and following an agreed-upon format, made several in-person and phone requests of government offices to determine how well officialdom was obeying the law that enshrines the Canadians’ right to know. The questions ranged through school classroom sizes, to drinking water testing results, to restaurant hygiene, to police complaints records and data on sick leave statistics by federal employees.

They discovered an unsavory patchwork of policies on compliance across the country. They ranged from poor, zero per cent , disclosure in the provinces of Prince Edward Island (PEI) and New Brunswick to a surprising 98 per cent compliance in Alberta. The federal government’s performance rated a disturbingly low 25 per cent.

As an example, New Brunswick police refused to turn over copies of records showing how many officers had been suspended for misconduct. In PEI, a school board official wanted to know why someone wanted records on class size. In Toronto, an inquiry about budgets for parks, which had been poorly maintained, would only be supplied for a payment of $12,960.

No national secrets here to threaten the public interest. Just data any interested taxpaying citizen has a right to know – a human right. The problem in most cases is not the law, which allows appropriate transparency; it is the culture of those who are gatekeepers on facts. Obstinate, arrogant they assume a “Who- the-hell-are-you?” attitude and too infrequently those in authority over them are too timid or lazy to jerk their chain.

Federal Information Commissioner John Reid’s observation was revealing on shortcoming in senior government. Nothing, he said has undermined the right of access more, in the past 20 years, than the “disdain” shown by prime ministers (he named two), a disdain that spread through their offices and those of the senior bureaucracy.

Stonewalling by school boards, city halls and police departments are harder to explain. They need correcting, however, by stronger leadership and firm attention by elected officials and senior civil servants.
This is an exercise, which could be duplicated to advantage in every Commonwealth country.

Canada’s national paper, The Globe and Mail, summed up the situation succinctly: “It’s shameful, really, the way Canadians are expected to plead for information that rightfully belongs to them.”