The Washington Post’s recently minted slogan, “Democracy Dies In Darkness,” arises from a long-ago U.S. court ruling on free-speech rights.
But we in Canada can heed its message, too. In an important but little noticed way, we are in that same darkness.
Our rights to know about our government’s activities are thwarted.
This is not a matter of partisan politics or ideology: no matter the political stripe, no matter the jurisdiction, our governments in this country restrict and redact information and divulge it only grudgingly, cloaked by the narcissism of power.
Worst yet, we do not know what we do not know. We never find out what was written, discussed, or recorded if governments choose not to provide it. There is no law that can defeat a government’s decision to withhold.
In recent weeks, the Justin Trudeau government made clear it will fail – as had its predecessors – to address our right to information freedom. Its most recent legislative proposal rescinded the many campaign commitments of Trudeau, whose father was the federal law’s first father more than three decades ago.
The federal and provincial laws that extend into our cities and shape our freedom of information bear an unmistakable declension of what they sought. These statutes ought to provide all of us access to the information – collected at our expense, it bears noting – in order to better understand what our institutions do.
But the laws have proven cumbersome, costly and corrupted – and will be much more so in the Bill C-58 under the Liberals. Like all of his campaigning counterparts seeking power, Trudeau pledged but did not deliver transparency. The government’s information commissioner calls the bill a regressive measure; Stephen Harper must have snickered in hearing that.
There is no freedom of information. There is its imprisonment.
There is a culture within governments at all levels – our city’s, our province’s, our country’s – of destroying, distorting, deleting and dispossessing what should be disclosed and ours.
We seem shocked when we hear of the Trump administration or Hillary Clinton using private emails for government business, but that has been the culture here for decades. In countless instances our public servants use alternate forms of communication to avoid release, never create records in the first place, and wake up each day with the malignant intention of keeping what we ought to know from us.
This is not conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy practice.
And to be clear, this frontier does not involve disclosure of matters national security or invasions of personal privacy. Governments should keep certain secrets.
Rather, this involves the bread and butter activities of our institutions, the historical footprint of policy development, the insight into the value-for-money of our government programs, and the crucial detail of government business operations. This makes us less efficient and informed and is yet another corrosion of democratic principles.
We ought to be furious about the obvious denials of our right to know, but we are instead anaesthetized by incessant vanity-like government releases. It is difficult to assess what governments spend more on: hiding information or distorting it.
What few outside journalism would know is how many former journalists now comprise the machinery of government to frame information in a positive, persuasive light. It is large-scale sell-out of a craft to crass survivalism, a shameful step in many cases into deliberate miscommunication.
We now have in our country a contest of wills between those who seek information in the public interest and those in the public sector who seek to suppress what we want and deserve.
The government side – the side that ought to be our side – is far more formidably resourced than the newsrooms and research bodies that collectively seek disclosure. It is winning the battle without breaking a sweat.
Our need is not for what the young Trudeau proposes but what the elder Trudeau introduced. In an ideal world we would have routine disclosure and a culture that requires those who serve or transact with institutions to have to argue for non-release. Other places do, but we are a long way from that – far and getting farther every time governments amend the already weak legislation.
We now rank in the bottom one-third of the world’s countries with freedom of information law. It is a national disgrace – and thankfully for governments, a relatively invisible one about which their popularities do not seemingly suffer – and an emerging pretension of a federal government we elected to be different. At a municipal level, our city’s freedom of information record draws a regular F-grade in independent studies of the law’s effectiveness. The province has promised better, and has almost nowhere to go but up from its predecessor, but we’ll see.
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver Media Group and vice-president of Glacier Media.
