Democracy dies behind Ottawa’s veil of secrecy
“Ministers don’t fix the problem because they don’t want it fixed. If the public doesn’t care, it will only get worse.”
The past 20 years in the media business has been characterized by all manner of wrenching upheaval and existential dread, but one thing has remained constant: The federal government’s endless communications bureaucracy stands relentlessly athwart most any attempt by journalists to extract information from it. No matter how banal the inquiry, the access-to-information (ATI) machine is capable of astonishing feats of redaction.
This has never amounted to a problem for Conservative or Liberal governments: The vast majority of Canadians simply don’t seem to care. But it’s not just egotistical nosy-parker reporters, or researchers, or individual citizens getting the shaft. Parliamentarians themselves are facing the same problem.
Last year, amid reports the U.S. military might fund mining projects in Canada, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner filed an order paper question with the Ministry of Natural Resources. These are written questions MPs can submit to ministries, which are required to respond within 45 days — not with the sort of boilerplate nonsense to which journalists are all too accustomed, but with actual information more befitting an elected official sworn to protect the public purse.
Rempel Garner had some very specific questions: “What criteria (were) used to determine which projects were selected,” for example. Natural Resources Canada responded with boilerplate nonsense: “Canada is working with allies around the world to develop secure critical minerals value chains,” yadda yadda yadda.
And when Rempel Garner filed an ATI claim for the internal communications that produced that boilerplate nonsense … well, it’s quite a scene. She has released the records publicly and I counted 32 people contributing to or copied on various interminable email chains discussing how the ministry should respond other than with facts.
