During the day, we do interesting work in beautiful buildings, and in the evenings we can guzzle free wine at receptions — although, admittedly, too often it is watery Ontario red.
But as good as we have it, in a way these days we are like frogs in a pot of water on top of a stove. The water is getting warmer and we haven't really noticed.
The government of Stephen Harper has gradually increased the level of political control over public information to an extent that is unprecedented in Canada or similar countries, to the point that we are starting to think it is normal.
The government has the legal authority to act as it is acting, and the political mandate to do so, since the gallery made this an issue in the recent electoral unpleasantness, and Harper won a majority.
That doesn't mean, though, that we should pretend that this is normal. It is not normal.
When I came to Ottawa, in 2004, reporters were able to get officials on the phone and interview them. Departmental communications officials answered their phones and spoke freely.
There were bullies in the some of the political offices, and the Liberals had been in power so long that the staffers did not always behave as humble servants of the people, but it was usually possible to get responses to queries from public servants in a timely way.
If the political staffers in the ministers' offices were not very careful with their public statements, they could find themselves being contradicted by civil servants, which meant they had to be careful to stick to the truth.
In 2006, when Harper took over, he set about imposing his will on an Ottawa bureaucratic and media establishment that was largely hostile to him. He did so by subjecting those departmental communications people to political control.
There is now a complicated and mysterious series of approvals that communications officers must obtain before they can release the blandest bit of information.
They will not normally speak on the phone with journalists, instead insisting on written questions in email form. Those emails are then routed through ministers' political offices and vetted by analysts in the Blackburn Building on Sparks Street in downtown Ottawa.
These public servants work in the office of the Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet (Communications and Consultations). In the 2008-2009 Government of Canada telephone directory, there were 95 phones associated with that organization, up from 35 in 2001-2002.
It takes more people to control the information flow across government. The Treasury Board Secretariat told me Wednesday — I asked Saturday — that there are 3,824 Information Services employees in the federal public service, up from the 3,118 in place when Harper came to power.
It would be difficult to get a detailed breakdown of the number of public servants engaged in communications, since the people who know are not allowed to talk to journalists and the political people likely would prefer that we don't know.
The work of the Privy Council Office employees who approve media responses is secret. The organization will only say it plays a role in co-ordinating responses among departments. They also interact with the political staff in the prime minister's office in approving queries, but they will not comment on that.
There is a cost to all this control. Canadians have less information about what their government is doing than they used to have, and less information than citizens in the United States or United Kingdom.
The governments in both those countries have made available online huge amounts of information. In Canada, the government is talking a good game about openness, but a similar project is in its infancy, and there has been a huge, co-ordinated effort to restrict the flow of information and a massive push to use the techniques of marketing in government communications.
Harper's former director of communications, William Stairs, gave a talk to a Quebec journalists conference on the weekend. He told them that Harper sees politics as a chess match, and when he moves a piece on the board by publicly communicating, he doesn't want anyone else to do anything that messes with that message.
He has every right to exercise that control, but it's getting a bit weird.
Nobody gets in trouble for keeping their mouths shut, but people in government are really afraid — like, really afraid — of Harper, and they are right to be. He has shown repeatedly that he will end the careers of public servants who contradict his message.
The result of this fear is paralysis and silence.
Doug Saunders, the Globe and Mail's reporter in London, recently went to Bangladesh to cover an election there. He contacted the British, American and Canadian embassies to ask for a "background briefing," an off-the-record chat.
"Within two days of arriving I was able to sit down and have tea with the British ambassador, have coffee with the American adviser and the Canadians, who had to do it through the PMO, got back to me two weeks after I got back from Bangladesh."
This is not normal.
Origin
Source: Canada.com
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