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Costs and delays – not excessive secrecy – drove the Conservatives to shut down a key Access to Information database, says Prime Minister Stephen Harper
Mr. Harper was forced to explain in the House of Commons Monday why his government quietly killed off a database called the Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System.
Created in 1989 and revamped in 2001, the CAIRS database is a monthly compilation of all Access requests received by federal agencies. Canadians could use it to see the information that had already been made public or was in the process of being released, and could then make a request to see the documents themselves.
The database “was deemed expensive, it was deemed to slow down the access to information, and that's why this government got rid of it,” Mr. Harper said during Question Period.
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“This is a government that has actually widened access to information,” he said to a chorus of jeers by the opposition.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion accused the Prime Minister of leading “the most secretive government in the history of our country.”
“The government should have consulted the clients of the database who are using it every day: the researchers, the MPs, the journalists, ordinary Canadians,” Mr. Dion said. “How far will the Prime Minister go to hide the truth from Canadians?”
Defending the policy change, Mr. Harper cited academic Alasdair Roberts, an expert on freedom of information who first made the CAIRS database available to the public online by requesting the electronic records through his own Access to Information Act request.
“The database in question was created by the previous Liberal government. It was called ‘the product of a political system in which centralized control is an obsession,' and that's why the government got rid of it,” Mr. Harper said, citing a 2003 opinion piece by Mr. Roberts.
Reached by e-mail in India, Mr. Roberts said the shutdown of the database raises new questions about how the Harper government will manage oversight of access to information requests.
“How are they doing the central oversight function, if not through CAIRS?” said Mr. Roberts, a professor of law and public policy at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.
“How does the [Privy Council Office Commuicaitons] and its security and intelligence office keep track of incoming requests? How do key departments keep track of sensitive requests arriving elsewhere? Have they established new processes for doing this?”
In a notice last week to civil servants on the Treasury Board website, officials posted an innocuous obituary: effective April 1, 2008, "the requirement to update CAIRS is no longer in effect."
Public Works, which has operated the database, spent $166,000 improving it in 2001. As recently as 2003 federal officials had been working on a publicly accessible, online version.
Monthly paper lists have also been made available since the 1990s for public consultation at a central federal office in Ottawa.
A spokesman for the Treasury Board, which oversees Ottawa's access policy, said CAIRS was initially intended to be an internal tool, and that users can now obtain the information by going to federal agencies one by one.
David McKie, a CBC journalist who regularly updated the CAIRS website, said the database's users included journalists, business people, academics, students and ordinary Canadians. Mr. McKie said he was surprised by the decision, given that Treasury Board co-operated with CAIRS for years.
"It's a real shame," he said. "I believe in accessibility and I believe that all Canadians should have access to this."
Under the Access to Information Act, Canadians can ask the government to provide documents on specific issues for an initial payment of $5. The information is supposed to be released within 30 days, with specific provisions for the exclusion of top-secret or sensitive information.
There are growing complaints within the community of Access to Information users that the delays in the release of the information have been increasing in recent years.
But Mr. Harper said Monday that his government has “widened” access to information by making a number of agencies and Crown corporations subject to access laws, including Canada Post, the CBC and the Canadian Wheat Board.
With reports from Daniel LeBlanc and The Canadian Press
