„Wirklich düstere Situation“: Zu den vorgeschlagenen Änderungen beim Zugang zu Informationen gehört die Entfernung von E-Mails und die Möglichkeit, dass Abteilungen Anfragen zurückstellen können
„Wirklich düstere Situation“: Zu den vorgeschlagenen Änderungen beim Zugang zu Informationen gehört die Entfernung von E-Mails und die Möglichkeit, dass Abteilungen Anfragen zurückstellen können
10 Kommentare
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What creeps me out about this is the fact that, as an Ontarian, this is the sort of behaviour I would expect from the likes of DoFo. Seeing it come from a government led by the party that once nominally preached the values of transparency is ironic but not really surprising. It’s especially gross feeling because I think we all know that if any other party moved in this direction, the backlash would be riotous. The fact that stuff like this can effectively be rewarded by continued governance does not bode well of things to come, particularly the long term health of our political culture.
*“removing “transitory records” like emails or texts from the act in favour of “records that have ongoing business value and that are stored in official repositories.”*
Gonna need to see that more fleshed out. Typically, it’s the institution itself that determines if something is transitory, so in the absence of more information, the potential for abuse is INSANE.
I worked in FOI in the BC government and have a lot of federal experience too. No one in government likes this system. It’s not just political and partisan people, bureaucrats hate it too.
Now maybe every other province is different but I doubt it. It was commonplace to see public servants sticking the words “cabinet confidence” on everything to dodge FOI. As a partisan staffer I would suggest redactions that barely made sense and the FOI bureaucrats would always agree.
The only way transparency doesn’t disappear entirely is if people fight back. Tell any politician who wants your vote or money, transparency is a deal breaker.
Absolutely zero foresight with proposals like these in considering how future governments will abuse them. Not to say the current government won’t abuse it either.
A decade later people still complain about Harper silencing scientists and other issues with lack of transparency. But many are content to sweep stuff like this under the rug.
Unfortunately most voters are oblivious to these issues or don’t care so the populace is pretty powerless to fighting back on it.
I know a few folks who work at federal departments, and the one thing they tell me pretty much without variation is how much of an absolute pain to deal with access-to-information requests are.
Typically, as they tell it, the work of entire teams is put on hold for weeks while they painstakingly assemble the hundreds to thousands of relevant documents, examine for possible disclosures, recommend redactions, and so on.
And it’s not like they are given time, staff or support to deal with them – they’re expected to handle these requests on top of their regular day jobs and deadlines, with ever-fewer staff because of cuts.
The Canadian public should have a right to know what their government is doing, 100%. But as with most things, we don’t want to pay for it in the form of staff and funding to properly process these requests.
And so you get a system that burns out civil servants, and results in months or years-long delays on both information requests and other deadlines that have to be shelved to meet them.
Remember this law and laws like it when they tell you that you’re going to need an ID to access a computer, spend money, or charge you money to move around the city.
Privacy is being diminished and transparency is disappearing.
We decried when harper started on this track, and barely a pip when the rest do nothing to undo it.
Or, hear me out, we properly fund the departments and not force arbitrary cuts that will disproportionately affect the „back end“ management services like this.
No? More airplanes and bullets instead? Oh well.
FOI is very expensive to run and hasn’t been reasonably accounted for by the government. The immediate response to a program that’s hard to run, expensive and has no upside (to the government) is to cut it.
The public needs to make clear that this is still necessary, and the only way to do that is political pressure. A call to your MP is the best thing you can do about this.
That said, the public and the press may have to accept alternatives rather than individual personal service. Pro-active disclosure, like posting all government purchases and contracts, all financial reports, as many government databases as possible, this might have to become the norm for many things. There are for example journalists who ask every department, every month for how much is spent on travel and any food or beverages the government purchases and for what purpose. That could easily be covered by regular disclosure, for example. The government should be able to then refuse an atip to those sorts of charges and just refer the journalist to the website.
Similarly, many requests are for nothing specific, simply fishing expeditions: please send all emails, meeting notes, records of communications (eg. phone logs) on subject X for the last 10 years. This happens. On a large complex subject this can take dozens or more people weeks of time to do. These things are very costly to do, In real dollar terms, $100,000+ easy, some into the millions in salaried time.
So how does the government deal with this? How does the public want to handle these sorts of requests? Sometimes they’re legitimate, often they are designed to gum up the works as much as possible and to punish the government. Who this often ends up punishing the most is taxpayers.