In February, Université de Moncton professor Donald Savoie was seconded by the Treasury Board to advise its president, Reg Alcock, on government accountability and management practices. Savoie’s 2003 book, Breaking the Bargain, makes many observations similar to Reid’s. He agrees that faulty record keeping translates into the loss of organizational memory so necessary for proper decision making and management. Savoie outlines the extent to which a chill has infected government activities: there is a reluctance to put anything in writing, including e-mail, that might find its way into public discourse.
But to Savoie, public access to information ought not to compromise ministerial confidences, and it is precisely at that juncture that he and Reid are at loggerheads. “We must also confront the myth that the Act interferes with the provision of full and candid advice by officials to ministers,” Reid told the Ginger Group. “Most recently this old chestnut is being expressed by Professor Donald Savoie, one of the new government’s advisors. In fact, the act already has strong protection for the internal advice-giving and deliberative process . . . . If public officials don’t have the courage to speak ‘truth to power,’ and to put the public interest above the wishes of ministers, it is not because of the access laws!”
The embattled Information Commissioner submits an annual report to Parliament that includes dozens of government breaches of the Act, recommendations to strengthen it, and ideas for improving record keeping and management. In The Friendly Dictatorship, Jeffrey Simpson characterizes the official reception of Reid’s report as a charade: “The report becomes the opposition’s plaything of the moment . . . . Ministers do their best with feigned concern to assure Parliament that they are indeed taking the commissioner’s suggestions seriously, all the while knowing that this fury of denunciation from across the aisle will pass like a summer storm.”
Just the same, between 2003 and 2004, Liberal-turned-Conservative MP John Bryden headed an all-party committee of backbenchers that considered a host of improvements and updates to the access law. The result is Bill C462, the Open Government Act, which seeks to extend the Access Act’s jurisdiction to cover the Canadian Wheat Board, Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd., the cbc, and many other presently excluded Crown corporations. The new legislation would also bring Cabinet confidences, ministers and their entire staffs, and the travel and hospitality expenses of MPs and senators under the act. Bryden tabled the bill shortly before dissolution of Parliament in May, and it passed a second reading unanimously. Though Bryden is no longer in the House, New Democrat MP Pat Martin, with the support of parliamentary colleagues, wants the bill reintroduced.
But even if this new and improved Act were to pass, Reid says, there must also be a change in the surrounding culture. As it stands now he says, “The attitude has truly become,’Why write it when you can speak it? Why speak it when you can nod? Why nod when you can wink? ’
