An advocacy group promoting transparency in government, which obtained the document, suggested it indicated a plan to control and manipulate information.
But the office of Treasury Board president Tony Clement, confirming that the document was authentic, explained that the government’s main goal was to make it easier for Canadians to find information.
Clement had in fact told a technology conference in November that his plan was to consolidate the government’s web presence from about 1,500 to six or fewer websites.
“This consolidation will focus on putting the needs of citizens first rather than organizing our websites around the structure of government,” Clement had said in the speech delivered on the same day as the U.S. presidential election. “Ultimately, this will lead to an integration of services among different departments and thus improve services by saving clients time and effort.”
For example, an entrepreneur who now visits about 15 different sites to get information about starting a business, could soon find relevant details in one place, said Clement’s director of communications, Andrea Mandel-Campbell.
“The goal here to be able to access more information, not less,” she said. “Being able to find it in one place means you’re getting the information you need versus not getting all the information you need.”
The document also said that Harper directly gave Clement the mandate to create the policy, expected to reduce medium-term costs of publishing material online.
The document was leaked to the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, which promotes the right of Canadians to have access to government information and transparency.
The association’s executive director, Vincent Gogolek, said he has nothing against improving web pages and making them more efficient but suggested that, based on recent cases of some political speeches and inconvenient information disappearing from federal websites, Harper’s main goal was to control access to information and messaging. For example, he noted that Transport Canada had removed references to the environment from a webpage explaining the Navigable Waters Protection Act after it tabled legislation last fall to limit the law’s scope to a fraction of bodies of water across the country.
“This is not something that arose out of the blue,” said Gogolek, who declined to name the source of the leak. “This is a matter of concern and we have to raise the concern now because after it comes in, then it’s set up, money is spent, websites are redesigned and information starts to disappear.”
Mandel-Campbell dismissed the association’s concerns about disappearing information as a misunderstanding of the plan. She said the entire strategy was still being finalized, following discussions with the private sector and other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand and British Columbia, but added that she was not aware of any plans to eliminate specific websites of departments such as Health Canada, Environment Canada or Natural Resources Canada.
Gogolek said his association made a request, through federal access to information legislation, for records in Clement’s department related to the government’s online strategy after hearing about the minister’s remarks in November.
He suggested that the subsequent leak, in the midst of processing of the access to information request, indicates that someone felt the government wanted to hide its plans.
He also expressed concerns about social media monitoring or profiling, that he suggested could be used to identify critics.
Mandel-Campbell said social media accounts are public, subject to privacy policies of their service providers, while any information gathered by the government must be used in accordance with requirements of federal privacy legislation.
She said that Clement’s department recently monitored social media traffic, including sites such as Twitter, when he hosted a “Google Hangout” event on March 1, to talk about the government’s transparency policies. She said it used the tool in the same way it uses monitoring of media reports to track information and public opinion, and suggested that other federal departments could soon use similar tools.
“We were able to see that the number of people who tweeted and their followers meant that we actually had an outreach of close to 100,000 people,” she said.
The new web policies would also set guidelines to establish a “consistent and coherent approach” for government use of all its social media accounts.
The document also noted that some website changes could reduce visibility of ministers, but suggested creating a rolling window at the top of a new government home page to feature members of cabinet.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Mike De Souza
No comments:
Post a Comment