From deleted ministerial staff emails, to emasculating a proposed private member’s federal sunshine salary bill, authorities want to continue excluding a wide swath of government records from public access.
It’s the most intensive barrage in a long time of so much distrust and debate about the shape of Canada’s gross secrecy practices.
Federally, MP Brent Rathgeber quit the Tory caucus recently over the issue of transparency. He left after other Conservatives, with their majority on the House of Commons Access Committee, amended his private member’s bill that called for public disclosure of officials’ exact salaries for those earning more than $188,000.
Instead, the Conservative amendment proposed specific salary disclosures only for the few senior officials making more than $329,000 or with bonuses added in, about $444,000, which is the maximum amount a senior deputy minister could make. This is the kind of defensive amendment that senior PCO officials would press for to keep most of their colleagues’ specific compensation secret. This change could hardly be accomplished without the Prime Minister’s okay.
Note that provincial disclosure legislation in places like Ontario publishes officials’ salary data over $100,000. And Rathgeber’s bill conveniently left out any mention of legally disclosing all the exact special perks beyond the normal benefits and bonuses those senior public officials receive, or get away with.
At the same time, the issue of more thoroughly auditing both Senators and MPs’ expenses, especially given Senators Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin’s expense claims, is on the front burner, federally. Such Parliamentarian expenses are not covered under existing access legislation.
The kicker remains that Parliamentarians in claiming expenses still have loose accounting rules and do not need to produce or have, for public disclosure, exact receipts. A lack of such mandatory record-keeping makes accountability next to impossible. Also excluded from access is any Cabinet discussion of such excessive Parliamentarian expenses or of payments like the $90,172 PM Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff Nigel Wright made to Sen. Duffy to cover Duffy’s expenses.
Such lax record rules and exclusions from public access are not limited to the federal level.
One of the big transparency issues in British Columbia and Ontario is the deletion of ministerial records on controversial actions and projects.
In B.C., Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham reported last year that B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s office was not keeping all records requested on matters like plans to win ethnic votes using government resources. Durham also noted that the Premier’s Office had a high percentage of no records claims, possibly given much communications being done orally.
In Ontario, Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian recently issued a scathing report concerning former premier Dalton McGuinty’s assistants’ and former Energy Minister Chris Bentley’s assistants’ routine deletion of emails on the costly cancellation of two gas-fired power plants in the Toronto area.
The claim in both cases was that ministerial political assistants could exclude and destroy emails as being transitory in nature and an acceptable practice under archival and record-keeping rules. Had the emails been retained, it was not sure thing that public access would have been given. Cavoukian too raised the practice of ministerial communications simply not being kept as part of a “verbal culture” where records were deliberately not kept.
Frustration by Cavoukian was also expressed over municipal councillors’ records being excluded under municipal Freedom of Information legislation. The case that generated her comment was The Toronto Star’s denied request for city councillor Doug Ford’s meeting and communications records about bringing a NHL team to Toronto. The records were excluded upon her office’s review as “personal” and as being outside the coverage of municipal FOI.
Without mandatory record-keeping, greater coverage under right-to-know legislation and tough independent review and stiff penalties for record destruction, the public cannot get a clearer picture of financial transactions and actions of public officials.
Launched criminal investigations will have a tough time laying charges or getting convictions under current access and record management legislation.
We are truly at a crossroads when an MP quits his party on transparency grounds and when information commissioners become outspoken on the exclusion from access of much information and on the sidestepping of any need to keep or maintain records.
But is anyone ready to change?
The culture of privileged entitlement and secrecy has yet to be breached.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: KEN RUBIN
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