Harper People Problems: Public Relations vs. Public Access to Information

Sunday marked the beginning of Freedom to Read week, an annual event reminding Canadian citizens of the intellectual freedom they are constitutionally guaranteed. It also reminds us we are governed by other citizens with the capacity to permit or limit that freedom. These are citizens that we can hold accountable only to the extent that we know how they make their decisions and what consequences those decisions have.

The event this year stands out on the Canadian political landscape, an uncomfortable reminder of just how frustrated the free flow of information has become in this country.

The timing is significant, as the event arrives on the heels of a University of Victoria study that highlights the Harper government’s efforts to restrict media access to federal scientists.

The study, called Muzzling Civil Servants: a Threat to Democracy and conducted by the university’s Environmental Law Clinic, found that new federal communications policies require government scientists to receive consent and coaching from media relations officers before speaking with reporters. The report also found that Environment Canada scientists are prevented from publicly commenting on such matters as “climate change or the protection of polar bear and caribou until the Privy Council gives approval.”

Such restrictive policies mean federal scientists are unable to respond to media requests within a short timeframe. With increasing regularity, interviews with scientists are grossly delayed or simply denied.

The government’s role in severing the ties between scientists and the media has been seen as integrally tied to the government’s role in streamlining industrial development in Canada, a plan in which tar sands expansion, increased levels of fracking, pipelines and supertankers are all implicated.

Now, more than ever, is not the time to scale back on or suppress the communication of the one thing that – in the world of heavy industry – stands between responsibility and recklessness: science.

Environment Minister Peter Kent recently praised Canada for the nation’s increased transparency and accountability in environmental decision-making, while outside the bureaucratic chambers journalists, academics and environmental organizations decried the government’s role in obscuring or misrepresenting inconvenient facts about Canada’s flagging environmental stewardship.

The one thing these recent events have made clear is the federal government’s willingness to prioritize public relations over public access to information.

Last week’s Muzzling report was addressed to Canada’s embattled Information Commissioner, Suzanne Legault.

Legault, referring to immense delays in access to information processing and dwindling percentage of disclosed information, told the CBC the Harper government is “not the most transparent.”

Unlike other Commonwealth countries, such as Great Britain and Australia, our Information Commissioner only has the power to suggest how requests should be handled, and cannot order departments to expedite responses or the release of information.

As Elizabeth Renzetti recently reminded us, this government’s transparency problem is not going away. Scientists will become more aggravated, like the hundreds who gathered on Parliament hill last July to make their frustration known. And they will likely become more empowered, with respected voices rallying them to fight back.

Canada has dropped ten places in the World Press Freedom Index since last year. We now sit at number twenty out of ninety – not even first in the Americas.

A sorry state of affairs when one must ‘celebrate’ the Freedom to Read in a country with no Freedom of the Press.

But we can also look upon this as good news. Because the only truly bad news is the kind that is withheld.