New access law is needed for a digital age
TheStar.com – Opinion/Editorials – An all-party Commons committee is on the right track with a series of overdue reforms to fix the broken Access to Information Act.
June 20, 2016. Editorial
Federal officials should no longer be allowed to cite vague reasons of cabinet secrecy to keep important facts from the public. That’s among several excellent proposals from an all-party Commons committee meant to revamp Ottawa’s 33-year-old Access to Information Act. The Liberal government should pay attention.
To share fully in democracy, the public must have power to hold politicians and bureaucrats accountable for their actions. To do that, it’s essential to see and understand what they’ve done. And the key to such transparency is effective access to information.
Unfortunately, the existing law meant to provide openness has failed to serve as it should. Requests for data are routinely rejected, often on the flimsiest of excuses. And a process meant to produce speedy results has left some people waiting years for official records. Information watchdog Suzanne Legault has gone so far as to say that Canada’s law meant to foster openness actually works as a shield against disclosure.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has promised to deliver reforms through legislation coming this year, or early in 2017. It would do well to pay particular attention to a set of changes proposed this past week by the Commons’ standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics.
One especially useful change that should be written into law concerns cabinet records, all of which are currently exempt from access rules. This loophole is particularly worrisome, with government departments and agencies increasingly citing cabinet secrecy to nix information requests. The number of such rejections jumped by 49 per cent in 2013-14 alone.
The all-party committee, quite rightly, found that “purely factual or background information” should not be a matter of cabinet confidentiality at all. Furthermore, when a request has been rejected on grounds of cabinet secrecy, the office of the information commissioner should have the power to investigate that refusal. Currently, even Legault, in her capacity as federal information commissioner, isn’t allowed to see the documents involved.
Other welcome recommendations include:
– Limiting deadline extensions for delivery of records to a maximum of 30 days. Longer extensions would require permission from the information commissioner.
– Amending the act to establish “a comprehensive legal duty to document” what government does, backed up by punishments for non-compliance.
– Requiring institutions to “proactively” publish information that is “clearly of public interest,” without waiting for an access request.
These changes would go a long way in bringing Canada’s obsolete information law into the 21st century. Democracy would be well-served by such a result.
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