Public information should not have to be pried out of government鈥檚 reluctant hands. When it comes to public business, the default should be to a culture of openness, not a culture of secrecy. And privacy legislation should not be used to suppress information that could be politically embarrassing.
sa国际传媒鈥檚 privacy commissioner has said that the provincial government was free to post two investigative reports online, one on the Health Ministry firings and the other on the overpayment of executives at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Victoria lawyer Marcia McNeil鈥檚 report on the firing of eight health researchers was released in December 2014, while assistant deputy finance minister Rob Mingay鈥檚 report on overpayments to Kwantlen executives was issued in June 2014. Neither was posted on the government鈥檚 website, but both were provided to the media and others upon request.
In a letter to the sa国际传媒 Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, Elizabeth Denham said the government could have used ministerial orders to publish the information on its website. The government had claimed that the sa国际传媒 Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act prevented it from posting the reports and permitting access to personal information from outside sa国际传媒.
Freedom-of-information legislation was supposed to make government more open and accountable, but it has sometimes had the opposite effect. In too many cases, governments hide behind the privacy aspects of the legislation, often to limit political embarrassment. Whatever the government鈥檚 intent, the Health Ministry and Kwantlen issues have both been extremely awkward for the sa国际传媒 Liberals.
In response to Denham鈥檚 letter, the sa国际传媒 Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens鈥� Services issued a brief statement this week saying that the government 鈥渞elies on the advice of trusted professionals when determining whether an investigative report or aspects of an investigative report can be publicly posted or released.鈥�
The directive to those trusted professionals should be: 鈥淲e will publish this information unless there are compelling legal or ethical reasons not to. The potential for embarrassment does not fall into either category.鈥�
And the response to issues should be not be terse, carefully crafted emailed statements, but a person who can explain and answer questions.
These days, a question asked of government goes through a communications person, who goes to the source or sources and then relays the filtered and sanitized reply back to the person asking the question.
The sa国际传媒 government is not alone in its informational tight-fistedness. The champion is the federal government under Stephen Harper, which jealously guards even the most innocuous information.
A prime example occurred in 2012, when the Ottawa Citizen asked the federal government a simple question: What鈥檚 this joint study the National Research Council and NASA are doing on falling snow?
Rather than having a person respond, the feds sent an email with technical details on hardware, but little information on the nature of the project. Even that response involved at least 11 government employees and a blizzard of emails back and forth as they decided how to develop a response and massage the text.
While the Canadian bureaucrats were dithering, NASA answered everything in a single phone call.
The sa国际传媒 Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act has two main purposes, says a government website: 鈥淭o make public bodies more open and accountable by providing the public with a legislated right of access to government records, and to protect your right to personal privacy by prohibiting the unauthorized collection, use or disclosure of your personal information by public bodies.鈥�
The legislation was intended to protect and benefit the people, not the government. Officials should keep that in mind.
