Dean Beeby, an independent journalist and author in Ottawa, is a specialist in the use of freedom of information laws. His latest book is Mass Murder, Police Mayhem – The Mass Casualty Commission: The Facts, the Findings, and What Must Be Done.
Pierre Poilievre has spent an almost equal number of years in government and in opposition. As a Conservative leader now buoyed by the polls, he has a shot at vaulting back into power.
On the issue of government transparency, a subject he raises frequently, Mr. Poilievre therefore has a track record. He was a minister himself, with two portfolios, and was a parliamentary secretary to prime minister Stephen Harper. So how does his behaviour inside government on this issue compare with his recent years on opposition benches?
Mr. Poilievre has legitimately upbraided Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for failing to live up to promises of open and transparent government. Among his targets is the anemic Access to Information Act.
As an MP, for example, he filed a 2016 request under the act for internal analyses of the economic impact of the new carbon pricing regime. The response he got was several hundred pages of blacked-out material. The access office said the material was censored to protect information that could be “injurious” to the government’s financial interests. Mr. Poilievre called the excuse “insanity.”
Mr. Poilievre later made public his four-page complaint to the information commissioner’s office, which demanded that the black ink be removed. “[I]t is the right of every Canadian to know the impact of the taxes they pay and it is the role of the Access to Information Act to ensure it is available to them.”
During a 2020 news conference, Mr. Poilievre tossed into the air several heavily blacked-out pages from a 5,000-page package of government documents on the WE controversy, which the Liberals released just before proroguing Parliament. “This is a cover-up,” he said in disgust, theatrics that seemed appropriate to the offence.
Mr. Poilievre once said in a podcast that government officials deliberately “grind people down” by delaying responses to Access to Information Act requests.
The Conservative Leader is right to challenge secrecy, especially when it’s self-serving and ingrained. The Access to Information Act needs urgent repair, and should be high on the to-do list of any freshly elected party.
But opposition parties often lose their appetite for openness once they grab the levers of government. Power is allergic to transparency. And that’s exactly what happened in the Harper government in which Mr. Poilievre once served.
After election in 2006, the Conservatives implemented only a few pieces of their promised broad reform of the Access to Information Act. Mr. Poilievre was responsible for shepherding into law the Federal Accountability Act, which failed to give order-making power to the information commissioner, and allow them to review cabinet documents for potential release. Both promises were highlighted in the Conservative election platform.
Mr. Poilievre became minister of state for democratic reform in 2013, and soon introduced the Fair Elections Act, a law heavily criticized for undermining the rights of some voters. (Most of it was later repealed by the Liberals.) The government rebuffed an Access to Information Act request for Mr. Poilievre’s 2013 briefing book about the proposed measures, withholding all but three of 199 pages, and blacking out most of the three. The cabinet office eventually agreed to release the document – but only in 2033. Mr. Poilievre’s office said the minister had no role in the decision to withhold, washing his hands of the matter.
In 2010, a parliamentary committee on access to information, privacy and ethics held hearings into an alleged case of political interference into the processing of one of my access requests. A minister’s political aide had ordered the file withheld from me, even though the access office cleared it for release and the aide had no authority to overrule anyone. (The information commissioner concluded in 2011 that the aide had indeed improperly interfered.)
Mr. Poilievre was among several Conservative MPs who stymied efforts by committee members to question the aide, who’d been called as a witness. When it was Mr. Poilievre’s turn for questions, he lobbed softballs, telling the aide: “I encourage you to continue with your long track record of service to the Canadian people.” He apparently lacked any interest in exposing Canada’s first documented case of political interference in the release of documents under access to information. Transparency was not on his agenda that day.
The Harper government had a poor track record on access to information, quickly losing its zeal for reform. It killed an information registry. It even went to the Supreme Court to successfully prevent the release of prime ministerial agendas – agendas it had insisted on obtaining under the act while in opposition. In 2014, Tony Clement, the Treasury Board president, said the government wanted more reform of access to information but “we’ve run out of time” before the 2015 election – this, nine years after the Conservatives were first elected.
To be clear, the Trudeau Liberals also reneged on access to information, which they grandiosely supported while in opposition. They failed to deliver on key election promises, and let the system disintegrate once in government. It’s a dismal, familiar cycle. Transparency is vital until it’s not.
How to break the cycle? It starts with exposing hypocrisy, and confronting party leaders with their broken promises. Voters also need to demand more than vague assurances of reform. What is the timetable? Show us the draft legislation. How much money are you committing? Will you bog it down in study? And whenever opposition politicians vent about government secrecy, they should be asked: What exactly will you do about it when you’re in the driver’s seat?