Canada's failing federal Access to Information system

I'm quoted in a piece Jeff Davis wrote that was published in today's Hill Times talking about Canada's crunked Access to Information system. I told Davis that, from my viewpoint, the system was screwed up and underfuned — but has been forever, under governments of all stripes.

“It's not that the Conservatives are particularly bad at this compared to any other group: governments are bad, I can't stress that enough,” I told Davis. “Governments, historically, do not want to tell the public what's going on in a lot of areas.”

Davis also interviews Dean Beeby of The Canadian Press, an ATI ace with a great nose for writing a information request that produces documents with a good story in them.

In Beeby's view — and its one I'll defer to as he's had much more experience than I have with federal ATI requests — Canada's access regime has gotten worse than ever under the Conservatives who, ironically, loudly and frequently claim they've made government more accountable and transparent than ever. Beeby tells Davis he's “never seen the system so broken. Back in the eighties, when I first started using it, governments were more naïve about it and were unclear about what strategies were available to them,” he said. “Over the decades, governments have gotten much smarter about ways in which the act can be circumvented or subverted…. and successive governments have become more sophisticated at finding the loopholes.”

Beeby and I, though, are bit players in Davis' piece. The starring role goes to an unnamed Tory political staffer who says that it is “standard operating procedure” for ministerial or political staff to interfere with the release of documents under the Access to Information Act, a big no-no a possible violation of federal law:

Cabinet ministers' offices had been under orders to pressure bureaucrats to pare down the amount of information released under the Access to Information Act up until The Canadian Press recently broke the story on how one political staffer killed the release of a document, forcing the Prime Minister's Office to get involved and to do some damage control, says one Conservative staffer.

“Since we formed government, the PMO has been pressuring us to take a hard line on ATIP requests,” the staffer, who did not want to be identified, told The Hill Times.

The Toronto Star's Tonda MacCharles has more evidence of Tory staffers behaving badly when it comes to interfering with the release of information:

The release of an annual firearms report last fall was delayed by testy officials in the public safety minister's office who demanded to know, among other things, details about an employee “celebration” of the program's 10th anniversary.
That was just one of a series of questions posed to RCMP officials after the 2008 Commissioner of Firearms Report was delivered to the minister's office for tabling – a full seven weeks before it was released publicly.
Emails obtained by the Star show then-public safety minister Peter Van Loan's office sat on the report for weeks until after a contentious parliamentary vote that saw 12 NDP and eight Liberal MPs succumb to political pressure and support ending the long-gun registry.

To give you one more sense of how gummed up things are right now: I routinely ask for the House Cards of ministers I cover. House Cards are prepared by bureaucrats to give ministers some answers and backgrounds to questions they might receive that day in the House of Commons. That's why they're called House Cards. A minister might have to prepare to face questions on up to a dozen different subjects each day, depending on what's hot in the news, and so bureaucrats try to anticipate these questions and give the minister some suggested answers and some background. Of course, a minister might get through Question Period without ever being called on to answer a question or may not otherwise use these House Cards.I collect them because, for one thing, they're great background when you go to write about a given issue and, if they arrive in time, they might give you some sense where the government is heading on a certain issue or where it might feel a bit vulnerable.
A House Card's usefulness, however, tends to diminish over time. And, though House Cards are a routine document which, you would think, would not require too much vetting, it's taking longer and longer to get them. Today, for example, I'm going through two months worth of House Cards for one minister that were released to me on Feb. 10. When did I ask for them? 767 days ago on January 5, 2008. To me, taking that long is breaking the law. To the current government, that's just the way the system works. The only person who's going to decide who's right about that view is the voter. When voters start to care, perhaps politicians will start putting the resources, money and attitude into the system to make it work better.