A Love Affair with Secrecy

After the Access Act was passed, few politicians had any clue what its limits were, and whether they could write memos to each other without risking that the substance of its contents would appear on the front page of a newspaper six months later. According to Reid, government record keeping started slipping as officials became adept at finessing ministerial guidelines. On the condition of anonymity, one retired MP told me, “When [the Access Act] was first legislated, I stopped getting and sending memos altogether. When I was asked to file a report on government activities, I sent one note —very formal, and clean as a whistle. My real concerns, criticisms, and analysis I put into a personal letter that was protected by the Privacy Act. After all, why would I want to place incriminating evidence that could be accessed by the media or by the opposition parties down on paper? ”

Describing record - keeping practices at an interdepartmental intelligence committee of the Privy Council Office, Deputy Information Commissioner Alan Leadbeater told me that the last time he checked, “they had ceased keeping minutes . . . . The members of the committee [which included officers from Foreign Affairs] loved that decision.” At the end of the day, if a problem arose with a mission, Leadbeater explained, there could be no way of knowing who had authorized its deployment in the first place.

In some cases, bureaucrats went so far as to destroy extant records — as in the tainted-blood scandal of the mid-1980s. The uproar over that fiasco, combined with the findings of the Somalia Inquiry, forced the government to append a clause to the Access Act in 1998, making it a federal offence to destroy, falsify, or conceal public documents. And yet, no new record-keeping legislation was initiated, and Ottawa remained on a course toward an infinitely mutable and variable oral culture.

In August 2000, the Ministry of Justice and the president of the Treasury Board launched a task force to review the Access Act. The committee’s report, delivered in June 2002, found “a crisis in information management” within government. The review concluded that the public’s right of access to information is not part of government culture and is considered an unnecessary burden by many civil servants. One of the reports the task force considered, published by the National Archives in August 2001, observed that at meetings of the Canadian Environmental Advisory Council, minutes were kept, but only in the most perfunctory fashion. The council established guidelines that exempted references to individuals’ names unless those individuals specifically requested inclusion. This same report described record keeping of a federal - provincial Atlantic fisheries committee as inconsistent — undertaken not by a permanent secretary, but by members who rotated the responsibility.

When asked to explain why record keeping has become so erratic, Reid topped off accounts of a downsized civil service with horror stories about a hybrid system that simply does not work. Information management is one part electronic and one part paper: on the one hand, government information technology people complain long and hard about overstocked hard drives and defunct e-mail programs; on the other hand, government records are often nothing more than tiny slips of paper and crumpled receipts stuffed arbitrarily into stock files. To be sure, upgrading the electronic system and retooling the record-management system is both necessary and desirable, but it is also costly and not one of the government’s first priorities.

The lack of tough record-keeping legislation strikes at the heart of governance itself. This much can be gleaned from the Auditor General’s report: “We found a memo in one file,” Fraser wrote, “indicating that the minister’s office had overturned a decision by program staff not to sponsor an event; the memo said the minister’s office would inform the event’s organizer. The file did not show who in the minister’s office had made the decision and why, or how the level of sponsorship funding had been determined.”

“When you don’t know who ordered what, when, and why,” Reid said, “what you are doing is not governing, but flying by the seat of your pants, which is the case for much of what goes on in this town.”

Equally troubling is the manner in which some civil servants have learned to use secrecy as a method of garnering the boss’s attention. A researcher at the Ministry of Defence told me that his colleagues will often stamp files “Top Secret” or “Confidential,” not because anyone thinks they are essential to national security, but as a ploy to get senior management to look at them. The net effect is the same: public information becomes private.

Reid believes these practices are not merely strategic. Rather, he suggests that the government is carrying on a love affair with secrecy and finds the title of the massive 2002 task-force report —“Making It Work for Canadians” — ironic, given that it was created almost exclusively by government insiders predisposed to entrench the culture of secrecy. In the report, Reid’s concerns are dismissed as “perceptions,” and the current lack of trust between Reid’s office and government is described as “mostly reflective of a lack of communication.” Reid responded in seventy-five pages of tightly argued prose accusing the task force of relying on “the foxes to advise on the security arrangements for the hen house.” If the report’s recommendations were to be accepted, a significant power shift over information, away from citizens and back to the state, would come into effect. Needless to say, the already limited role of the Information Commissioner would be further reduced. Several senior civil servants with whom I spoke confirmed Reid’s assessment, but refused to do so for the record.

To get important government documents made public, Reid’s office has been forced to fight the pmo, the Minister of Defence, and the Attorney General all the way to the federal court of appeal. In the past, government has been notoriously bad at keeping to the thirty-day deadline, and costs associated with making records accessible have sometimes gone through the roof. In one case, the feds invoiced a client more than a million dollars.