Which Tony Clement you get often depends on the subject.Over the past year, Clement has been one of Canada’s most approachable MPs. Send him a message on Twitter and chances are he will respond.
As treasury board president he is opening the government up to new technology — from reading speeches off his iPad, to doing interviews via Skype, or organizing the federal government’s first Twitter Town Hall to discuss his open government initiative.
However, Clement has also been heading one of the most secretive processes of all in an administration that has raised government secrecy and message control to new heights. Clement’s strategic and operating review, also dubbed the deficit reduction action plan, is enveloped in such a deep cloud of mystery that even the most senior public service executives are largely in the dark.
When it comes to the controversial G8 Legacy Fund, which showered Clement’s Muskoka-area riding with $50-million worth of beautification projects including the now iconic gazebo, Clement can be maddeningly mute, sitting silently while others field the barrage of questions in the House of Commons.
Opposition MPs argue the way the fund was set up from the start, with much of the application-level paperwork flowing through Clement’s riding office, was done deliberately to keep it away from governmental checks and balances, such as Canada’s auditor general.
The contrast between Clement’s openess in some areas and his secrecy in others wasn’t lost on some participants in his town hall last month.
“How can I trust that government is committed to Open Process when G8/G20 budget was anything but transparent,” tweeted Jim Creechan of Toronto.
Many more, however, welcomed Clement’s Open Government initiative — a wide-ranging program that could making sweeping changes in the way Canadians interact with their government and how information is shared.
Although several government departments currently block employee access to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Clement wants to allow public servants to use social media to better communicate with Canadians. While his Guideline for External Use of Web 2.0 has been criticized for being overly cumbersome and bureaucratic, Clement argues formal guidelines are necessary in order to get government departments to buy into the idea.
As part of the Open Government consultation, the government is posting weekly summaries of suggestions from the public to its website.
That kind of openess is being extended to other consultations as well through the existing Consulting with Canadians website, which could allow citizens who can’t afford high-priced lobbyists to chat up government officials at Hy’s to get the government’s ear as well.
However, there is no sign yet of Clement holding an open consultation, town hall or committee hearings to get the views of Canadians on the government’s deficit reduction action plan, let alone to hear their ideas on what should be cut, or how government could save money by being more efficient.
While the Conservative government shut down the CAIRS database that kept track of access to information requests, this year it began posting summaries of completed access to information requests on each department’s website. Each department has up to 30 days after a request is completed to post a summary to its website. While it means information about what is being requested will be more open, there are concerns it could discourage some requesters from making access to information requests in the first place.
Quarterly financial reports for each government department are being posted as well, allowing Canadians to monitor spending as it evolves throughout the year.
As industry minister, Clement presided over the decision to scrap the mandatory long-form census collected by Statistics Canada. Now, as treasury board president, he is opening up millions of dollars of Statistics Canada data to the public.
In February, the agency is expected to begin providing free access to data that had previously cost businesses, and others, hundreds of dollars to access.
On top of that, Clement brags the government has made thousands of data sets available through its Open Data portal. His hope is that enterprising entrepreneurs will use that data to design new and profitable applications. While 260,296 of the data sets posted so far are geographical information, there are 5,379 others now posted and others being added regularly.
During the Twitter town hall Clement said he was a fan of hackathons and appeared open to the idea of Ottawa staging an app development contest using federal government data.
For all of its promise, however, Clement’s Open Government initiative has yet to pass the true test: What happens when making government information open and letting public servants speak directly with Canadians leads to something that embarasses Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government?
That test, which could come in 2012, is when Canadians will find out whether Tony Clement is truly the most open of ministers, or the most secretive.
Original Article
Source: iPolitico
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