Improving public access to information will make government better, Trudeau says

[mentalfloss]

Improving public access to information will make government better, Trudeau says

OTTAWA — Ensuring Canadians have access to federal information will mean more — and sometimes difficult — public scrutiny, but ultimately it will lead to better government, the prime minister says.

The Liberals will conduct a “proper review” of the decades-old Access to Information Act with the aim of figuring out “what is actually going to work,” Justin Trudeau said this week in a wide-ranging roundtable interview with The Canadian Press.

He reaffirmed the new government’s commitment to modernizing the federal access law, which has changed little since coming into effect on July 1, 1983, when Trudeau’s father was prime minister.

It was an era when steel filing cabinets full of paper greatly outnumbered personal computers holding digital files, and many complain the access law has not kept pace with technological change or greater expectations of transparency.

The legislation allows applicants who pay $5 to request information in federal files, such as briefing notes, studies, correspondence and expense claims.

Ideally, requests are supposed to be answered within 30 days, but departments and agencies often take much longer. Not all agencies are covered. Cabinet records are almost completely off-limits for 20 years. And officials can withhold a wide range of information, including advice from bureaucrats and lawyers, security-related material and correspondence from other governments.

Information commissioner Suzanne Legault, an ombudsman for users of the law, recently said she was struggling to clear a backlog of some 3,000 complaints from dissatisfied requesters.

Improving public access to information will make government better, Trudeau says | National Post

 

[MHz]

Wow, good on JT. Maybe Putin and Trump will follow his lead.

 

[Bar Sinister]

Judging from the first two months the current government is the most open in Canadian history. It still has a long way to go to match governments like Sweden's but it is on the right track.

 

[mentalfloss]

You mean it isn't just selfies?

 

[davesmom]

You mean it isn't just selfies?

I must be missing something. The Liberals are making themselves available to the public for lots of questioning but they aren't giving any answers. All we get is, "We're looking into that", "We're working on a plan", "When we have a plan in place we'll let you know", "We want to 'get it right'".
That doesn't tell us a damned thing, except that they don't know themselves what they are doing.
Surely when they were making campaign promises they must have had some idea of how they were going to fulfill those promises. It seems that they were waiting to get elected and THEN started wondering about what to do and how to do it.

 

[lone wolf]

Better at what?

 

[CDNBear]

I must be missing something. The Liberals are making themselves available to the public for lots of questioning but they aren't giving any answers. All we get is, "We're looking into that", "We're working on a plan", "When we have a plan in place we'll let you know", "We want to 'get it right'".
That doesn't tell us a damned thing, except that they don't know themselves what they are doing.
Surely when they were making campaign promises they must have had some idea of how they were going to fulfill those promises. It seems that they were waiting to get elected and THEN started wondering about what to do and how to do it.

To the disciples of the cult of personality, that's all that matters.

The fluffers will fluff at all cost.

 

[tay]

Bruce Cheadle notes that the cost of the Cons' bad judgment is still accumulating, as a challenge to their attempt to retroactively permit the illegal destruction of data is still making its way through the courts. .......


A retroactive Conservative law buried in last spring's omnibus budget bill fundamentally undermines the rule of law and government access-to-information systems across Canada, according to court submissions in a paused constitutional challenge.

Twelve of Canada's 13 provincial and territorial information commissioners, as well as the Criminal Lawyers' Association, are seeking intervener status in the case, which challenges the former government's unprecedented rewrite of an old law to get the RCMP and any other government official off the hook for illegally destroying long gun registry records.

The case, brought by federal information commissioner Suzanne Legault on behalf of individual Bill Clennett, is one of the messier legal challenges the new Liberal government will have to mop up in 2016.

The retrospective Conservative changes, backdated all the way to October 2011, served to short-circuit an active investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police into the government-backed actions of the RCMP. Repealing the changes, which became law last June, would presumably put the Mounties back under investigation.

"Should this legislation withstand this challenge, it would have far-reaching implications for criminal law principles," the Criminal Lawyers' Association says in its submission to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, calling the retroactive legal rewrite ground-breaking.

"State actors obtained the benefit of a retrospective immunization that ordinary citizens have never obtained."

The new Liberal government asked for, and received, a three-month delay in the start of the trial last month as it mulls over its options.

It's been a long legal road.

The federal information commissioner had begun an investigation into a complaint about access to firearms registry records before the government passed the Ending the Long-gun Registry Act in April 2012. The government subsequently assured Legault that it would preserve the records until her investigation was complete, but then pushed the Mounties to quickly destroy the data, in breach of the law. Legault completed her investigation last spring and informed the government of an alleged offence — at which point the Conservatives retroactively rewrote the law, stripped Legault of her jurisdiction over the gun registry records, retrospectively absolved anyone of wrongdoing, and closed down any further investigation.

The former government called the retroactive law a "technical amendment" designed to correct a "bureaucratic loophole" in the original 2012 act.

The intervener submissions paint a very different picture.

Provincial and territorial information commissioners say they share "profound concern" over questions of "fundamental importance," including "immunizing public officials from liability and prosecution."

"Legislation retroactively removing the right of access and oversight mechanisms in their entirety, or government action destroying the records, is a particularly egregious infringement," of the constitutionally protected right to access government information, says their joint application for intervener status in the court case.

"Should the constitutional validity of these measures be upheld, the implications for access legislation will be nationwide."

The Centre for Law and Democracy, a Halifax-based advocacy organization, is also seeking intervener status in order to argue that the retroactive changes break binding international law on access to government documents, to which Canada is a party.

But it is the Criminal Lawyers' Association that frames the constitutional challenge in its most basic terms.

"Put simply, citizens must expect that when they break the law, they are subject to investigation, proceeding and sanction even if the government subsequently repeals the law that was contravened," says the CLA submission. "This is fundamental to the rule of law: a citizen is forbidden from breaking the law that exists at the time of their action."

Law and information groups challenge ‘far-reaching’ retroactive Conservative law | National Newswatch