Bring information laws into 21st century
TheStar.com – Opinion/Editorials – Canada’s Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault is pushing for major changes that would bring our access laws into 21st century.
Apr 03 2015. Editorial
Canadians can be forgiven for thinking that the country’s access to information laws are actually about “access to information.” That would be entirely logical, but quite wrong.
The woman charged with overseeing our information laws makes that clear in a disturbing new report that advocates a complete and long-overdue overhaul of the system.
As she made her report public this week, federal Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault had this to say about Canada’s Access to Information Act: “Instead of the act really promoting and moving the government forward in a culture of openness, it has seemed to have moved us forward in a culture of secrecy.”
Worse, she went on, the right-to-know law has actually evolved into a “shield against disclosure” — exactly the opposite of what it was intended to be.
In her almost five years as information commissioner, Legault has been a powerful advocate for openness and transparency in government. Ready access to information, she has argued, is vital for Canadians to participate fully in their democracy: “It ensures that citizens can hold politicians and bureaucrats to account for their actions and decisions.”
This is so fundamental that it should hardly need repeating. Yet successive governments have chipped away at the information laws, layering on exemptions and qualifications that destroy its very purpose. The Harper government — with its mania for secrecy, spinning, redacting and control — has made it even worse.
As Legault has written in the Star, Canada was a world leader in access to information legislation when the existing act came into force way back in 1983. But the world moved on, other countries leapt ahead of us, and an international survey two years ago ranked Canada just 55th out of 93 nations in the effectiveness of its information laws. That isn’t good enough.
Now Legault is pushing for finally bring our access laws into the 21st century. All parties should support her sensible recommendations, which include:
– Broadening coverage of the act to include all branches of government, including Parliament itself, the Prime Minister’s Office and cabinet ministers’ offices. All institutions paid for by taxpayers’ dollars should be covered.
– Setting tighter deadlines for responding to requests for information, and making it harder for agencies to ask for an extension beyond 60 days.
– Making sure exemptions to requests for information cover only what is strictly necessary, and introducing a “general public interest override” for exemptions.
– Bringing in new sanctions for failure to disclose information, including fines and criminal penalties.
– Doing away with all fees for access requests.
– Requiring government departments and agencies to declassify information “on a routine basis.”
– Allowing disclosure of personal information “in circumstances in which there would be no unjustified invasion of privacy.” Blanket “privacy” exemptions covering all personal information have become one of the most common ways for official bodies to block disclosure.
Legault makes many more recommendations — 85 in all — aimed at breaking the culture of secrecy that surrounds so many official activities in Canada. Instead of presuming that everything should remain secret until it can be pried out of government, the onus should be reversed: the presumption should be that information should be publicly available unless there are compelling reasons for it to remain secret.
All parties should endorse this principle. To his credit, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is making an effort with a private member’s bill that would update the information laws and open up Parliament’s secretive Board of Internal Economy, which oversees MPs’ spending. The NDP supports those ideas, but without Conservative support the bill won’t go anywhere.
Nonetheless, it’s high time that Canada’s information laws were brought into the modern era. This is important for our democracy and Legault has done a valuable service by laying out a blueprint for change.
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