“The majority of experienced access and privacy professionals have the integrity, strength of character, and good judgment necessary to resist being bullied into submission,” Ms. Polsky said, after canvassing some of her members for this story. “But the reality is that some may feel obligated to comply or fear retribution when a superior gives direction to do – or not do – something incorrect or unwarranted.”
THE PROPOSALS
The 2006 Conservative platform promised to fix all this by giving the access commissioner “the power to order the release of information” and to let the commissioner see cabinet records to ensure government claims of cabinet confidentiality are justified. Both had been advocated by then-commissioner John Reid.
Instead, just one of eight proposals were adopted: expanding the law to cover a number of new institutions, including the CBC and the Wheat Board.
Mr. Reid was livid. In a special report to Parliament, he wrote that the Accountability Act will “increase the government’s ability to cover up wrongdoing, shield itself from embarrassment, and control the flow of information.”
A year later, Mr. Reid’s successor, Robert Marleau, said public complaints to his office were doubling year over year and documents were being held up in the Privy Council, the central department that reports to the prime minister.
Mr. Marleau presented the House of Commons Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics committee with a list of 12 recommendations for reforming the ATI law. In the spring of 2008, the committee began a study of those suggestions that wrapped up a year later.
The MPs on the committee, which like all other Commons committees is dominated by opposition members, supported 11 of Mr. Marleau’s recommendations and submitted a report to Parliament in June of 2009, which it called the “first steps” toward ATI renewal.
The response of Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, who is responsible for the act, made clear that the wait for reform has no end in sight.
“The government’s view remains,” he told the committee in June, “that implementing the proposals recommended in the committee’s report would be neither quick, nor easy.”
HUMAN-RIGHTS DATA DELAYED NEARLY 3 YEARS
Delays in the release of documents requested under access-to-information legislation are routine, but some are more egregious that others.
Ken Rubin, an Ottawa researcher who is an access expert, asked the Canadian International Development Agency in March, 2007, for the so-called “watch lists” of human-rights violations committed by foreign countries in 2006.
These are notes sent to the president of CIDA and the cabinet minister responsible for the agency.
The documents were finally delivered in December of 2009.
The delay was never explained, though the request was vetted by the Privy Council, the bureaucratic arm of the Prime Minister's Office, which slows the process.
“A lot of it was based on rather mundane material that could have been obtained from public reports,” Mr. Rubin said, “but it did have some clues about those countries and their violations so it would have been useful to get it much earlier.”
With a report from Jane Taber
