News from the government of British Columbia. Sorry citizens, we have no files. There is no written record of our decisions. You want to know how we operate? Sorry.It’s no joke. A report from Elizabeth Denham, the province’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, says the rate of ‘no records’ responses to freedom of information requests is soaring. At the premier’s office, no less than 45 per cent of requests were turned back for that reason.
The file cupboards are increasingly bare, the commish says, because emails are being destroyed and senior officials are communicating orally rather than putting anything in writing.
If you want a formula for deniability, it’s a hard one to beat. It means that on any controversy that emerges, there is no documented way to establish culpability. No records. No accountability.
If the oral culture of governance is booming in British Columbia, how might it be doing in other provinces and in Ottawa? I remember first learning about this kind of thing while writing about the Afghan detainees’ affair. A bureaucrat from the defence department described it this way: “I get a call from the Privy Council Office. They’re setting up a conference call. The first thing that is said is, ‘No note-taking, no recordings, nothing. We don’t want to see anything in writing on this.’” The bureaucrat said this was the way policies were being developed. “It’s scary.”
Given the Harper Conservatives’ well-documented penchant for secrecy, no one would be surprised if the practice as seen in B.C. is on the rise here in Ottawa. The Conservatives don’t show much enthusiasm for record-keeping at places like Statistics Canada. They don’t like oversight agencies, some of which have been cut back or eliminated. They don’t like auditing; the number of auditors has been downsized.
The thing about record-keeping is that there are no regulations mandating it. “There’s no rule in law,” said the B.C. commissioner “that prohibits government from operating on an oral basis.” In her report she called for legislative changes to set standards.
To forego record-keeping, governments need the cooperation of their bureaucracies — which are supposed to be politically neutral. Bureaucracies are notoriously good at keeping paper trails, though there have been times — such as during the Chretien era at the Human Resources department — when big gaps led to major controversies.
The Harper government has put the public service under its thumb to an extent old Ottawa hands have never seen before. The bureaucracy’s policy development function has been diminished. Stringent procedures have been put in place to vet almost all communications.
Green Party leader Elizabeth May is the latest to raise the alarm over the politicization of the bureaucracy. It has become evident, she alleges, that the upper arm of the public service, the Privy Council Office, is doing the bidding of the prime minister’s office. Instead of sticking to the facts, she says, the PCO and senior levels of the public service are being used to buttress political arguments.
For example, she says the Environment Canada report on greenhouse gas emissions is nothing but an exercise in public relations, very much out of whack with the facts. Over at Justice Canada, she has been told that lawyers are asked for legal opinions but told in advance what they should be. She recalls that the government put the word out that no officials at Statistics Canada objected to the elimination of the long form census. That claim turned out to be hogwash.
The public service, May concludes, “is completely corrupted by political pressure.”
The Conservatives deny most every charge, holding to the line that they operate one of the most open governments of all time. Treasury Board President Tony Clement, who has an interesting record on openness in previous incarnations, claims that open data sets are now being made available to the public at an unprecedented rate.
The Conservatives’ failure to hand over documents has landed them in hot water on many occasions. The prime minister was found in contempt of Parliament for failing to make information available. His ministers’ repeated refusals to hand over documents to the Parliamentary Budget Office have been well documented.
There is a way to avoid these types of problems. The Conservatives — if they haven’t started in earnest already — need only follow the example of the Liberal government in British Columbia. If you have no documents, there can be no documents to disclose.
Like the B.C. commissioner says, it’s time — and not just in that province — that laws and regulations were put in place setting standards for government record-keeping.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Lawrence Martin
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