Too much about the state of access to information in Canada feels like the doings of a surly teenager.
The federal system is buckling under its own under-resourced weight. Rules for compliance are basically whimpered suggestions; they’re routinely ignored and nothing happens when they are. An entire province simply refuses to provide any information. People can’t even obtain documents about their own affairs, fended off by the ubiquitous shield of “privacy.”
Teenagers only wish they could display such obstinate contempt.
What it all means is that, as a citizen, you can in theory request myriad forms of information that belong to you. But in practice, you’ll wait a dog’s age to get it, or be charged a small fortune, or receive pages of blacked-out redactions.
And everyone knows this. For officials who reflexively hoard information, it is a known feature, not an accidental bug, that the public has such a difficult time prying information out of the system’s jealous little claws.
But then there is Newfoundland and Labrador, perched on the edge of the Atlantic like a beacon of transparency. As documented in The Globe’s series Secret Canada, the province has one of the strongest and most functional ATI systems in the country.
The province offers many useful examples for how to craft an access-to-information system that actually works for the people it’s supposed to serve: the public, not reluctant politicians or bureaucrats. But the most important lesson it offers is the necessity of having a culture of transparency rather than of jealous secrecy.
Newfoundland’s access to information system was designed cleverly and elegantly. But the reason it works – and the reason it was designed well in the first place – is because it’s underpinned by norms that dictate that public information belongs to citizens, and they should have access to it as quickly and simply as possible.
The province didn’t arrive there instantly, or easily. Newfoundland is also a useful case study in the ingredients that can spur that sort of culture shift, or at least nudge a jurisdiction closer to ATI utopia.
Newfoundland’s reset was sparked by public outrage over a 2012 access-to-information bill seen as egregiously secretive and tight-fisted, and which became such a political liability that the government executed an about-face. The indignation about what was kept from the public was further inflamed by massive delays and cost overruns in the Muskrat Falls project around the same time.
There was also a happy accident of political cynicism: the party that updated the ATI system knew it was about to be cooling its heels on the opposition benches, so having a robust way to pry information out of the government suddenly looked politically advantageous.
But the key element feeding all of these developments was a public that had had enough and forced a change in what was acceptable.
Building any access-to-information system without the right underlying culture is like constructing a new building on eroding ground. You can reinforce the structure all you like, but it’s only a matter of time before it lists, because it sits on a faulty foundation.
It’s not possible to create rules and consequences muscular enough to override people’s motivation to deke around them as long the incentive to do so is more powerful than the fear of getting caught. The default belief in politics is that secrecy is less risky to the people in charge than transparency, and, in too many jurisdictions in Canada, that’s still true. Following access-to-information rules by the most parsimonious possible interpretation – or not at all – is the inevitable outcome.
The people with the power to change that calculation are the ones who were supposed to wield the clout in these systems all along: citizens who should be able to find out what their governments are doing, and who should feel entitled to be given that information and crankily indignant when it’s kept from them.
Amazing things can happen when government secrecy and manipulation tips over from being a useful instrument to an ugly liability. Canadians should cast a glance to that transparency beacon on the East Coast, make like the Rock and say enough is enough.