Not quite that simple Bear. Quite a few people used the information and granted, it didn't always show the government in the best light. Harper did promise "open government" and obviously, he has changed his mind.
Harper government kills key information registry
Sat, May 3, 2008
It was used to hold the government accountable
By DEAN BEEBY, THE CANADIAN PRESS
checkCookie(); OTTAWA -- The federal Conservatives have quietly killed a giant information registry used by lawyers, academics, journalists and ordinary citizens to hold government accountable.
The registry, created in 1989, is an electronic list of every request filed to all federal departments and agencies under the Access to Information Act.
Known as CAIRS, for Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System, the database allowed ordinary citizens to identify millions of pages of once-secret documents that became public through individual freedom-of-information requests over many years.
But in a notice last week to civil servants on the Treasury Board website, officials posted an innocuous obituary: effective April 1, 2008, "the requirement to update CAIRS is no longer in effect."
A spokesperson for Treasury Board confirmed yesterday the system is being killed because "extensive" consultations showed it was not valued by government departments.
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The consultations concluded "the valuable resources currently being used to maintain CAIRS would be better used in the collection and analysis of improved statistical reporting," said Robert Makichuk.
Public Works, which has operated the database, spent $166,000 improving it in 2001. As recently as 2003, federal officials had been working on a publicly accessible, online version.
Monthly paper lists also have been made available since the 1990s for public consultation at a central federal office in Ottawa.
In the meantime, a Canadian academic put the database on his website and opened it to public use, allowing citizens to quickly search thousands of requests for key words.
Alasdair Roberts, a political scientist at Syracuse University in New York, built a version of the database by requesting the CAIRS electronic records through an Access to Information Act request, and updated the site monthly.
CBC journalist David McKie took over the work in 2006 using another publicly accessible website (
http://www.onlinedemocracy.ca).
Users searching key words cannot access the documents themselves, only the wording of the original access-to-information request, the date, the department, a file number, and general information about the requester, whether media, business, academic or other.
