Report gives Harper government a failing grade for transparency

It’s a good thing ‘Access to Information’ isn’t a class in school. If it were, Stephen Harper’s government would flunk — and flunk hard, according to a report from a prominent media advocacy group that awarded the prime minister an F- on the subject this week.

For the second year in a row, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression gave the prime minister’s government the lowest grade possible, saying it has taken longer than ever to access information on Mr. Harper’s watch and that the information they finally get is far more incomplete.

The new report, called Like Sheep to the Slaughter, says Canadians need to stay alert and protective of their right to freedom of information. It also points to specific examples of how Canadian media have been treated when trying to access information, such as when a Public Works bureaucrat moved to “unrelease” information to the Canadian Press.

More than half of the federal institutions surveyed for their performance on access to information sunk below the average. Five of them failed, the report reads. Its statistics say 44% of access to information requests filed to the federal government are not returned in 30 days.



“The governing party was ruled in contempt of Parliament for failing to produce information about major spending programs,” the report reads. “All of which may explain why journalists seem to be using the access system less often than in the past.”

The federal government and security forces also flunked the test for the way they handled the G20 last summer in Toronto, especially their assertion that it was, by all accounts, an “unmitigated success.”

“The Orwellian concept of creating a ‘freedom of expression zone’ during the summit set the tone for a long list of violations of that freedom, from refusal to recognize legitimate journalistic credentials to detention of journalists without due process or cause,” the report objects. “It was not a success but an abject failure.”

The Supreme Court of Canada got a C and earned both a positive and negative review for both forcing a journalist to turn over notes revealing his sources and also upholding the rights of journalists’ to protect sources if they can prove it’s in the public interest.

All of that said, the news wasn’t all bad for the Harper government. The Office of the Information Commissioner headed up by Suzanne Legault was given an A-, the only above average grade earned by the federal government this time around.

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Source: National Post