The unofficial safety valve
With the arteries of Canada’s access system clogged, journalists must increasingly rely on a more traditional, backdoor approach to gathering potentially troubling information: finding leaks. In the public imagination, leaked stories come about when a journalist and an ethically motivated whistleblower pair up to get the truth out. This perception originates largely in the United States, where leaking is practically woven into the fabric of the nation. The secret carpet bombing of Cambodia ordered by Richard Nixon, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, was leaked to the New York Times in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg. Then there was Watergate, uncovered by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in large part because of Mark Felt, better known as Deep Throat. More recently, there was Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco company insider who leaked documents and told his story to cbs’s 60 Minutes in 1995; Seymour Hersh’s work on Iraq; and that of James Risen, who reported on government eavesdropping for the New York Times with the help of inside informants. Such whistleblowers have been celebrated in books and movies, and have become admired figures in American culture.
Canada, by contrast, has known few high-profile leakers. Perhaps the most famous recent example here was Department of Public Works civil servant Allan Cutler, who protested back in 1995 that Chuck Guité, the bureaucrat administering the sponsorship program, was cooking the books. Despite having complained only internally, Cutler was declared “surplus” (read: fired) for his indiscretion. His full story came out only years later, during the Gomery inquiry.
Though Globe reporter Daniel Leblanc did rely on whistleblowers to break elements of the sponsorship scandal, leaking is rarely how corruption and gross neglect or incompetence come to the fore here. Canada’s institutional and political culture do not appear to allow for it in the same way. The biggest scandals of recent decades — among them the Somalia affair, Arar’s Syrian detention, the Afghan detainee story — were at first exposed to the public through other means, despite the fact that there were undoubtedly people who could have brought the information forward early on.
Some blame our bureaucrats. “We have an amoral civil service here in Canada,” Amir Attaran says, barely containing his rage as he speaks about the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, the Sudanese Canadian whom government officials consistently refused to repatriate between 2003 and June 2009. Even after Sudan’s military intelligence service told Canadian officials in Khartoum they were willing to “disappear” Abdelrazik, our diplomats kept silent. Approximately half a dozen civil servants “discussed the assassination of a Canadian citizen, and no one leaked that information,” says Attaran, who assists Abdelrazik’s legal team. “That’s sick.”
Attaran, an American citizen, is quick to point out the imperfections of officials in his home country, but he believes the Canadian bureaucracy suffers by comparison: “They are much more selfish than their US counterparts; they are just waiting to get their pensions.”
Taking a more sympathetic view is Alasdair Roberts, a professor of law and public policy at Suffolk University Law School who has studied both the Canadian and American systems. Roberts notes that scale is a factor. Canada has a much smaller bureaucracy, he says, “so it’s easier for the government to figure out who spilled the beans.” He also points out that the top six or seven layers in the US bureaucracy are staffed by temporary political appointees, who need not necessarily fear for their careers if they pass information to journalists.
The Conservatives did pass whistleblower protection as part of their transparency initiatives, notably by legislating the office of public sector integrity commissioner, which was designed to give civil servants the opportunity to report wrongdoing without reprisal. As of the commissioner’s most recent report to Parliament, the office had received some 114 disclosures of wrongdoing — yet it launched just two new investigations its first year, and had only one under way by early 2009. “We had hoped when it was brought into force that the office would be proactive,” New Democrat MP Paul Dewar said in July, “and that it wouldn’t be like the Maytag repairman and sit back and say, ‘Well, everything seems to be fine.’ ”
Ideally, federal civil servants would be able to expose wrongdoing without fear of reprisal. But again, critics point to Canada’s weak legislation, which leaves whistleblowers to rely on a commissioner rather than the courts to resolve their complaints. As conceived in the new legislation, the office of the commissioner has no real power — at best, she can report cases of wrongdoing to Parliament or refer reprisal cases to a tribunal of senior judges. And not once has she done either.
Chicken dinners and fake smiles
Surf through government websites in the two countries, and the long-term payoff of a culture that values transparency becomes obvious. Traditionally secretive organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for instance, pre-emptively post reams of documents in electronic reading rooms on their websites. Contra Orwell, the fbi even posts information known to have been collected for dubious reasons. “What do Jackie Kennedy, the Beatles, Albert Einstein, Gracie Allen, Thurgood Marshall, and Walter Winchell have in common? Give up?” the site asks, boasting, “They are all part of historical fbi records.”
That the rcmp has no similar site is not for want of material. Our national force amassed some 800,000 files on Canadians, some of which were disclosed thanks to ati requests. Singer Rita MacNeil was among those monitored during the ’70s, in her case for participating in Canada’s feminist movement. The rcmp also spied on Tommy Douglas, the first leader of the ndp and the father of Canadian medicare, because of his opposition to nuclear weapons and UN policy on Korea. Other subversives targeted by the force included Pierre Berton and Peter Gzowski.
Perhaps the most striking example of the differences in commitment to transparency are the two governments’ websites on stimulus spending. In keeping with Barack Obama’s disclosure initiatives, the US government has a site that allows Americans to download detailed databases offering basic project information, including locations, dollar figures, and the names of contracted companies. In Canada, meanwhile, journalists and citizens wishing to track, say, whether more money is being spent in Conservative ridings than in Liberal ones are directed to a website that, as this magazine went to press, showed pop-ups with a picture of the prime minister over areas receiving stimulus funds, but no precise dollar figures. In a column titled “Ottawa Is Sending Me into a Black Rage,” reporter Stephen Maher of Halifax’s Chronicle-Herald detailed his struggles to get a list of projects from the Prime Minister’s Office. After three weeks of repeated requests, Maher wrote, the pmo told him to “stop bothering them.”
Charles Lewis, founder and former executive director of the Center for Public Integrity — the investigative outfit where I worked in DC — saw that impulse repeatedly during Washington’s plague period. “I get sick of seeing politicians at chicken dinners with fake smiles on their faces,” he says, “when behind closed doors they clamp down on openness while making decisions that only a tiny percentage of the population can benefit from.” He speaks to the need for strong institutions and laws to combat this impulse, pointing out that “it is not in the dna of the human animal to put out information detrimental to itself.”
Indeed, the public inquiry into the detainee scandal all but ground to a halt this year, with Ottawa insisting that it be conducted mostly behind closed doors, excluding key witnesses and allowing others to receive questions in writing first. Equally troubling, in October justice minister Rob Nicholson rejected the recommendation of a House of Commons committee that Canada’s access to information laws undergo a long-needed overhaul.
