Keep spining sig... :lol: :lol:
Monday Magazine
Russ Francis
There was cake to mark the 10th anniversary of B.C.’s freedom of information law. But the celebration was mixed at best.
To hear management services minister Sandy Santori tell it, British Columbians are living in freedom-of information heaven. And he’s as enthusiastic as any of the advocates who struggled for years to have the legislation introduced and passed 10 years ago.
“I’m proud that I live in B.C. where we have such a strong [freedom of information] act,” Santori told 300 delegates early last Thursday morning, in a speech kicking off a Victoria conference on freedom of information and accountability in government. “We are all dedicated to providing public access to government information.”
“The B.C. government places a high priority on access to information and protection of privacy,” he added.
So impressed was federal information commissioner John Reid with Santori’s comments that he felt compelled to gush a few minutes later about how supportive the B.C. minister sounded.
“I have never heard a federal minister make such a speech since 1983 when the [federal] act was introduced,” Reid told delegates.
Santori’s enthusiasm suggested that all the delegates needed to do for the rest of the conference was chat about how fabulous the B.C. Liberals are, especially when it comes to releasing reams of public records upon request.
Admittedly, B.C. does have the strongest freedom-of-information [FOI] act in Canada.
It’s the only jurisdiction whose legislation covers self-governing professions, such as the B.C. Law Society and the B.C. College of Teachers. And it’s one of the few that does not charge applicants a fee to access their own personal records.
B.C. can also point to a first-rate Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, which manages to settle by mediation 92 percent of the 1,000 requests for review it handles each year.
Unlike the federal Access to Information Act, Santori reminded delegates, the B.C. Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act specifies that FOI applications cost nothing, as do requests for review.
But that tells only part of the story. Public bodies are allowed to charge fees to process requests after the first three hours of work on a request, and they are allowed to charge for photocopying. A simple request can quickly run up charges of hundreds or thousands of dollars, although public bodies must advise applicants before incurring any costs.
Santori boasted that the present rates—$30 an hour for retrieving records manually plus 25 cents per page for photocopying—haven’t gone up since the act was passed.
However, that ignores circumstantial evidence that many previously free routine requests are being hit with fee estimates, some in the thousands of dollars.
These are particularly ironic in light of Gordon Campbell’s pre-election urging that governments make records available without charge, on the grounds that the public has already paid for it once.
One indication that B.C. is lagging at least the federal jurisdiction in access to information, lies in the fact that several federal officials now post their hospitality and travel expenses on their websites. Auditor general Sheila Fraser (see:
http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/domino/other.nsf/html /2003exp_e.html) and information commissioner John Reid (see:
http://www.infocom.gc.ca/expenses/default-e.asp) are both in this club.
That contrasts sharply with the case in B.C.
Though their administrative records—including hospitality expenses—are technically public records under the law, not one of the six statutory officers of the legislature has taken the step of posting them online.
And even with formal information-access requests, it isn’t always easy to get the officers’ records of expenses.
Three years ago, one of them, conflict of interest commissioner H.A.D. Oliver, flatly rejected an information-access request that Monday filed for his hospitality and travel records. He claimed he was exempt from the legislation. When Monday appealed his refusal, Oliver—who regularly boasts to the legislature’s finance and government services committee of his frugality—hired the prestigious (and expensive) law firm Arvay Finlay to fight the request before the commissioner. (Oliver lost.)
Of course, the federal officials are doubtless inspired by the outrageous expense claims of former privacy commissioner George Radwanski, who has given new meaning to the term “troughing.”
By being open about their expenses, Fraser and Reid aim to avoid surprising MPs with what they’re spending public funds on.
It’s a lesson the B.C. Liberals—as much as the legislature’s officers—ignore at their peril.
At least in their public pronouncements, the Liberals are expressing more support than some officials of the last regime.
“Glen Clark said to me that the FOI act was undermining democracy in B.C.,” former commissioner David Flaherty related to delegates.
While the Liberals haven’t been as open about it—with the possible exception of senior bureaucrat Ken Dobell (see Politics, p. 10)—their actions suggest that deep down the present government feels the same way.
Apart from more frequent fee estimates, amendments to the law and a variety of other changes have not only lengthened the time for response, but they’ve added restrictions on information requests, exempted B.C. Ferries from the act, doubled the time for transferring requests and imposed huge delays (necessitated by budget cuts) on the “troublesome” requests that need the intervention of the commissioner’s office.
As last week’s conference wound down, staff from Loukidelis’s office presented him and Flaherty with a cake to mark the legislation’s 10th anniversary.
But as if to rub in the point that the Liberals have crippled the office with a 35 percent budget cut, the cake was tiny, less than a handspan in width.
And instead of 10 candles, there was just one.
Explained one of the staffers, only partly in jest: “We could only afford one.”
