BC Hydro has gone to court to avoid revealing the names of public employees who decide which companies are awarded lucrative Site C project contracts during construction of the $10.7 billion hydro dam.

B.C.’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) ordered BC Hydro to release the information after Vancouver freelance journalist Bob Mackin, who publishes The Breaker News, lodged a complaint about missing data in Freedom of Information responses and the OIPC conducted an inquiry.

“We’ve got a right to know who is being paid to build and operate and make decisions on any public project or any public office,” Mackin told The Narwhal. “There’s no reason why we can’t have it.”

Mackin said journalists and the public must be able to verify that people making decisions about Site C project contracts are free of conflicts of interest and that they are “not awarding contracts to friends or co-workers, or people they’ve worked with before or companies that they might hold shares in.”

“While their identities are shielded…the conclusion of the public would be ‘maybe there’s something going on behind the scenes,’” he said. “We really need to know that this project is being done in the best fashion. Let us see that this is being done properly.”

BC Hydro’s legal challenge — filed January 18 in BC Supreme Court — comes as the B.C. Legislature expense scandal ignites calls for increased transparency and accountability in government operations.

The Site C dam on the Peace River in northeast B.C. is the largest publicly-funded infrastructure project in B.C.’s history.

Site C dam secrecy ‘extraordinary’, international hydro construction expert tells court proceeding

According to BC Hydro’s website, the hydro project provides opportunities for “a number of large contracts for major project components, as well as multiple smaller contracts for supporting activities and ancillary works.”

BC Hydro awards some contracts directly while others — including contracts worth millions of dollars and, in two cases, $1.6 billion and $1.75 billion respectively — are subject to a bidding process.

Mike Larsen, president of B.C.’s Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA), pointed out that governments routinely release the names of public employees, including the names of people making decisions about major expenditures from the public purse.

“FIPA’s position is that the OPIC made an effective and accurate ruling in this case and that their decision was a reasonable one,” Larsen told The Narwhal.

He said BC Hydro’s reluctance to release the names of employees involved in adjudicating Site C project procurement proposals is especially concerning given the current “crisis” at the B.C. Legislature, as details continue to emerge about the lavish expenditures of sergeant-at-arms Gary Lenz and clerk Craig James.

“We don’t want to be in a situation where public employees are able to make decisions without the knowledge of the public and without some reasonable degree of scrutiny.”

In a claim rejected by the OIPC, BC Hydro says in court documents that making the names public could constitute a threat to employees’ physical and mental health and safety.

The court documents note that while public debate about the Site C project has often included “genuinely constructive, reasoned and peaceful protest and complaints, there have also been alarming displays of physical and threatened violence.”

As one example, BC Hydro cites a Site C project public information meeting held in Dawson Creek in July, 2015, where a protestor ripped down displays, overturned tables and screamed obscenities at BC Hydro staff.

RCMP who were called to the scene fatally shot a masked man they believed was responsible for the protest, but the person they killed was not the protestor, BC Hydro notes. The Independent Investigations Office investigated the shooting and cleared the RCMP of any wrongdoing.

BC Hydro also claims that unspecified persons made “veiled threats of future violence” at public meetings about Site C and that unspecified persons working on the project were told if they entered private properties impacted by the dam the landowners would be there with “guns waiting.”

In its December 11 order, the OIPC said it was not satisfied of a sufficient connection between the disclosure of withheld employee names and a threat to their health or safety.

“There is no suggestion that particular employees have been targeted because of their association with Site C.”

Incidents described by BC Hydro — which included the discovery in 2017 that a stop sign on the Site C construction site had two bullet holes in it — were directed at the Site C project in general and not at specific employees, the OIPC noted.

“No evidence was provided, however, that anything remotely similar has occurred at BC Hydro’s offices where the procurement assessment presumably takes place and records of the type at issue here are dealt with….It seems more likely that if anyone were to be the target of animosity related to Site C, it would be the board of directors or senior management, yet BC Hydro has not kept their names from the public and there is no evidence that they have been harassed.”

Larsen said FIPA will be watching the judicial review closely, saying it is “unfortunate” it might not be heard until 2020.

Freedom of information law exists to allow the public to scrutinize government decisions and understand how those decisions are made, under whose authority, and who is making them, Larsen noted.

If names are not released, “you can see the slippery slope that leads us to in terms of rendering controversial processes less transparent simply by virtue of the fact that they’re controversial…”

Given the contention surrounding energy projects in Canada, and the Site C dam in particular, Larsen said these projects “are precisely the kinds of things that we want to scrutinize and to have full and informed debate about.”

The OIPC also ordered BC Hydro to release minutes from board of directors meetings and an e-mail exchange with its main civil works contractor, Peace River Hydro Partners, a foreign-owned consortium.

The OIPC agreed with BC Hydro that disclosing information about the Site C project’s contingency figures could be harmful to BC Hydro’s financial interests.

But the OIPC was not satisfied that disclosure of contingency funds already spent on the main civil works contract “could reasonably be expected to harm BC Hydro financially or economically,” according to the order.

BC Hydro is not contesting the rest of the OIPC order and Mackin said he expects the information will be delivered to him this week.

Last year, an international hydro dam construction expert described the high level of confidentiality surrounding the Site C project as “extraordinary” and said he has never encountered such secrecy during his five decades designing, developing and managing large hydroelectric projects, including in China.

The B.C. energy ministry said in an emailed response to questions from The Narwhal that the government cannot comment on BC Hydro filing for a judicial review of the OIPC order “out of respect for the judicial process.”

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B.C.’s energy ministry says it prepared communications materials, including draft news releases, to support a “terminate scenario” leading up to the government’s decision about the Site C dam last December.

But those materials and associated e-mails were all redacted from a Freedom of Information (FOI) response package, according to energy ministry communications director David Haslam.

Last week The Narwhal quoted from the response package, showing that senior members of B.C.’s energy ministry drafted a press package — saying the Site C project would proceed — nearly one week before the pivotal December 6 meeting at which Premier John Horgan and his cabinet colleagues supposedly gave the green light to continue construction of the $10.7 billion dam.

The article quoted a December 1 e-mail from Haslam saying he was awaiting cancellation narrative documents before producing a suite of materials for the cancellation scenario, and noted that no such documents appeared.

The Narwhal also revealed that the government chose the worst case scenario out of 12 different scenarios to demonstrate hydro rate increases if Site C were cancelled.

In an e-mail to The Narwhal, Haslam said the “terminate scenario” documents were removed in accordance with B.C.’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, on the grounds that they contained “confidential advice or recommendations to Cabinet.”

About 70 pages were redacted from a 280-page Freedom of Information response package asking for communications materials related to last December’s Site C dam announcement. Sections of other pages were also redacted.

“I can assure you that communications materials, including draft news releases, were prepared to support both a terminate scenario and a complete scenario,” Haslam said.

Sara Neuert, executive director of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA), a Vancouver-based non-profit society promoting freedom of information and privacy rights in Canada, said it is important to differentiate between advice to cabinet and information for cabinet.

The latter should be publicly disclosed, she said.

Redactions are far too common in Freedom of Information response packages, Neuert told The Narwhal.

“It’s a serious issue. They’ll redact a whole page, and how do you really know that [the] whole page really covers a section that they’re claiming it covers?”

Legitimate reasons for redactions under B.C.’s freedom of information legislation include “policy advice or recommendations,” “legal advice” or because disclosure would be “harmful to the financial or economic interests of a public body.”

Neuert said while some government information must remain confidential, staff who vet Freedom of Information requests sometimes have a very liberal interpretation of permitted redactions and could benefit from more training to ensure the public interest is served.

“Checks and counter checks” need to be put into place to ensure British Columbians have access to information and “understand how the government is doing business,” she said.

Ken Boon, president of the Peace Valley Landowner Association, representing 70 landowners impacted by the Site C dam, said the government’s justification for redacting all Site C project cancellation scenario documents, including any e-mails referring to those documents, “lacks any credibility.”

“It’s very hard to accept,” Boon said. “To think that somewhere out there in cyberspace they created an alternative scenario — I just can’t believe that.”

The landowner association is calling on the government to release the redacted pages showing staff prepared a suite of communications materials for a cancellation scenario.

“I think it’s on them to prove to us that they actually did it,” said Boon.

Neuert said the only way to challenge the redactions is to file a complaint with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for B.C. The office has the power to launch an investigation that could take months or years.

Haslam pointed out that the government received 126 Freedom of Information requests related to the Site C dam decision and has released “thousands of pages” of response documents.

The response package to one of those Freedom of Information requests includes a document sent to the B.C. Green Party on November 28 with answers from the energy ministry to questions the Green Party asked about the Site C dam and BC Hydro.

The document was sent through the Confidence and Supply Agreement Secretariat, an office dedicated to managing consultations between the B.C. NDP and the B.C. Green Party to support the stability of a NDP minority government.

In response to a Green Party question about the risk posed to B.C.’s credit rating from cancelling the Site C dam, the energy ministry stated that credit rating agencies were “fully aware” of the government’s pending decision about whether or not to proceed with the project.

The ministry reminded the Greens that Standard and Poor’s had reaffirmed B.C.’s Triple-A credit rating only two weeks earlier.

The spectre of a downgrade in B.C.’s Triple-A credit rating as a result of terminating the Site C dam was used by the NDP government to justify its decision to proceed with the project, whose price tag climbed by another $2 billion last fall.

Reporters were told that the biggest risk of cancelling Site C was that credit rating agencies could “determine that BC Hydro was no longer a commercially viable entity.” That would “likely” lead to a downgrade of B.C.’s credit rating and higher interest costs, the government claimed.

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The federal government received a failing grade in a new national audit of freedom of information regimes across Canada.

The vast majority of federal departments under the Liberal government, which campaigned on a promise to increase information disclosure and transparency in Canada, failed to fulfill requests within the legal timeframe, the audit found.

“I was surprised at the depth of the how poor the federal performance in the audit was,” Fred Vallance-Jones, audit lead author and associate professor at University of King’s College, told DeSmog Canada. “That wasn’t expected.”

The report states, “this year, the audit has a special focus on the performance of the federal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and performance was even worse than in the latter years of the former Stephen Harper government.”

The national audit, which looks at freedom of information regimes federally, provincially and municipally, was conducted Vallance-Jones and freelance journalist Emily Kitagawa. The audit was prepared for and funded by News Media Canada and is the seventh report of its kind since 2008.

To avoid relying on government reporting and statistics, a team of researchers submitted a total of 428 requests to 24 federal departments, agencies and crown corporations as well as provincial and municipal offices over a period of four months.

At the federal level only a quarter of request were answered within the legal 30-day time limit and one-third of responses were still not fulfilled at the end of the audit timeframe. Two federal departments, the RCMP and the Departmetn of National Defense, provided no response to the requests whatsoever.

“When we were looking at the results, we were so surprised we actually sent emails to a bunch of departments asking, ‘what’s the status of the request,’ expecting them to say, ‘well, we sent our response to you, didn’t you get it?’ ”

Vallance-Jones said the requests, which are made available in the report, were standard and should not have led to delays in response.

Governments in Opposition, Not Power, Champion Access to Information Improvements

Vallance-Jones said he has seen many governments promise to improve the public’s access to information, but few deliver.

“Governments aren’t as enamoured with the idea of freeing information when they’re no longer the opposition,” he said.

“It’s not so shocking from that perspective. But it’s quite a contrast with the promises of government for sunny ways, greater transparency and accountability.”

Vallance-Jones added it’s worth noting the Harper government rode into power on a similar set of promises.

“They promised to change the system after the whole sponsorship scandal and did succeed in adding new crown corporations to the Act.”

“But the Conservatives back off most of the things they promised to do.”

The federal Liberals too have largely failed to move forward on their promised of open, transparent government, Vallance-Jones added.

Bill C-58, introduced by the Liberals in June proposes to amend the current Access to Information Act and Privacy Act, but has been called a step backwards by Canada’s Information Commissioner, Suzanne Legault.

The bill notably stops short of extending much-needed order-making powers to the commissioner.

Currently, the commissioner can review complaints filed under the federal system, but does not have the authority to order federal departments to release withheld information.

Several agencies with ties to the federal government are also left outside Access to Information legislation, meaning they have no obligation to release information to the public.

The Liberal government has stopped charging fees for fulfilling access to information requests, aside from a baseline five-dollar processing fee but the bill reintroduces the possibility of new fees as well as the right to deny requests deemed too large.

The audit found feed highly problematic in other Canadian jurisdictions. The City of Windsor provided the auditors with a $1872.60 fee estimate for a routine request, while the Ontario Ministry of Health cashed a cheque for a request but failed to provide the information paid for.

Overall the audit found the federal government’s proposed “watered-down” reforms  saying the Bill actually provides new avenues for agencies to deny the release of information.

Federal Freedom of Information in #Canada Worse Now Than Under #Harper: New Report https://t.co/B7waLPEspS #cdnpoli #cdnfoi @carollinnitt

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 29, 2017

Electronic Data. Because It’s 2017

The audit found the feds consistently failed to provide electronic, machine-readable documents.

The release of paper files or static PDFs that cannot be searched for keywords or data creates an “error-prone, complex process that many would not even attempt and which often yields poor results,” the audit found.

Despite requesting machine-readable records, the auditors found several federal departments did not comply.

“This is an ongoing problem,” Vallance-Jones said.

“Many places did a good job of this, but the feds did a particularly poor job of releasing machine-readable records.”

“This is the 21st century,” he said. “Journalists and the public need access to government data to do their jobs. But there is still a reluctance.”

Vallance-Jones added the audit found information released in electronic format is less likely to be released in full.

“Am I surprised? No. Am I disappointed that we’ve still not moved to a day where information is released electronically? Yes,” he said.

Systemic Problems of Secrecy Left Unaddressed

Not enough has been done to address the level of secrecy baked into the system, Vallance-Jones said.

“The federal government has done something but they haven’t addressed the systemic problems of exemptions, a lack of access to ministers’ offices and that kind of thing.”

“In a sense it’s an old baseline — we have a Westminster Parliamentary system which has always been founded on idea of cabinet secrecy and a civil service that is not heard from, that is silent.”

That lands Canadians in a situation where what is public is what the Minister says is public, Vallance-Jones said.

In addition, over the last several decades governments have become more sophisticated in how they restrict information.

“In general they have become better at turning the apparatus of government to private ends,” Vallane-Jones said, adding this was prevalent in the Harper government’s muzzling, reliance on spokespeople and long communications delays.

“You add that up, and it results in a lot of government secrecy.”

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By Shannon Daub & Zoë Yunker.

Newly uncovered documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests reveal the cozy relationship between the fossil fuel industry and the last B.C. government went even further than suspected — all the way to inviting industry to directly craft the province’s climate “leadership” plan.

Let’s rewind for a second: back in the spring of 2015, then-premier Christy Clark announced the provincial government would create a new climate plan.

A 17-member climate leadership team was appointed and tasked with developing recommendations to meet B.C.’s greenhouse gas reduction targets. The government released the team’s recommendations in the fall of 2015 — allowing then-Premier Christy Clark head off to Paris for the December 2015 UN climate talks cloaked in the mantle of climate “leadership,” after four years of near-total inaction by her government.

That’s where things got interesting.

Documents obtained via Freedom of Information legislation indicate that while the Paris talks were underway, the government launched a closed-door three month-long process to work jointly with the oil and gas industry to revise and re-write the climate leadership team recommendations.

The process entailed five rounds of meetings over three months with all the key corporate players, from oil and gas producers to distributors. It was divided into working groups on the carbon tax; methane and fugitive emissions (i.e., from natural gas production, a significant source of B.C.’s greenhouse emissions); and electrification (i.e., the provision of cheap electricity to natural gas extraction sites and LNG plants in order to make gas production less GHG-intensive).

Notably, most of these B.C. government-organized meetings took place not in B.C., but in Calgary — specifically in the boardroom of the most powerful fossil fuel lobby group in the country, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

The documents include a power point deck dated January 2016 that outlines the process for the “Climate Leadership Team Recommendations – Consultation with Oil and Gas Industry.”

The document is from the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, which led the “consultation”— not the Climate Action Secretariat, which coordinated the Climate Leadership Team (and, as far as the public knew, was the lead government agency working on the plan). The documents released also include agendas from one round of working group meetings on January 13, 2016, along with the attendee lists for those meetings.

These lists show that senior officials from the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, the Climate Action Secretariat and BC Hydro attended the January 13 meetings in person. We do not yet have access to the daily calendars for several other senior officials who we believe may also have been present.

Also in attendance were over two dozen representatives from at least 16 oil and gas corporations and industry groups, including the B.C. LNG Alliance (which also had a seat on the official Climate Leadership Team), Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Encana, Imperial Oil, Nexen/CNOOC, Progress Energy (wholly owned subsidiary of Malaysian state-owned Petronas), Shell Canada, Suncor, Teck, Woodfibre Energy, CAPP and others.

Recall that when the climate leadership plan was released in the summer of 2016 it largely ignored the leadership team’s 32 recommendations, in what was dubbed by some as a “climate non-plan.”

Meet the Real Climate “Leadership” Team: Big Oil and Gas Corporations

Most troubling of all is that this was much more than a “consultation” process.

The documents obtained make it clear that in fact the process constituted an invitation to the country’s most powerful oil and gas companies to shape both the substance and language of B.C.’s next climate plan.

For example, the working groups on methane emissions and electrification were each asked to “refine language in CLT recommendation” and to “add detail and process direction” regarding timing and whether policy measures would be voluntary or regulatory. The working group on the carbon tax was asked to “ensure consistency with other jurisdictions” and to “determine ‘the art of the possible’ (how much and how fast).”

The working groups were asked to come together to “work on offsets.” The timeline for the working groups also include the action item “finalize language” for the “CLP Framework” (ie, Climate Leadership Plan Framework).

Our FOI request asked for minutes and/or summaries of the meetings and industry consultation process, but none were released to us. Pages 19 to 38 of the relevant records were withheld on the grounds they constitute advice or recommendations to a public body or minister (S. 13) and/or that they would be harmful to the business interests of a third party (S. 21).

Perhaps these missing pages are the minutes and summaries. Or perhaps they are something else. We have asked the Information and Privacy Commissioner to review the government’s decision to withhold these records.

It should be noted that it took two FOI attempts to even receive this much information. In July 2016, we submitted identical requests to the Ministry of Environment/Climate Action Secretariat and the Ministry of Natural Gas Development for documents relating to any meetings or other communication between the fossil fuel industry and senior officials in relation to a wide range of energy and climate policy matters starting in January 2016.

The Ministry of Natural Gas Development withheld all documents having to do with the industry engagement process and Calgary meetings.

The Ministry of Environment released the agendas for the January 13 working group meetings (just the agendas, no other contextual information). It was only through a follow-up request to the Ministry of Natural Gas Development (now part of the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources) that we obtained the fuller set of documents reviewed here. These should all have been released in response to our initial request, along with material from the other rounds of working group meetings (and who knows what else).

A Stunning Example of Institutional Corruption

In sum, the B.C. government carried out secret meetings in another province with an industry that is a top contributor to the BC Liberal Party to shape policy that ought to constrain that very industry — as any meaningful climate policy must do in relation to the fossil fuel sector.

Ironically, none of these meetings “count” as lobbying under B.C.’s current Lobbyist Registration Act, which doesn’t require meetings or communication invited by public officials to be reported by lobbyists. Meanwhile, no other sector — environmental organizations, First Nations, etc. — could even dream of this kind of access.

BC’s Last #Climate 'Leadership' Plan Was Written in Big Oil’s Boardroom (Literally) https://t.co/lUKX67Hsy9 #bcpoli @CCPA_BC @bcliberals

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 18, 2017

This is more than a case of ideological alignment between a corporate-friendly party and its corporate donors. It is a profound blurring of the lines between government and industry, who set out to make policy together behind closed doors, while what can only now be characterized as a pretend consultation process was acted out publicly.

This blurring of the lines is an example of what ethicists refer to as “institutional corruption:” a “systemic and strategic influence that undermines the institution’s effectiveness by diverting it from its purpose or weakening its ability to achieve its purpose, including…weakening either the public’s trust in that institution or the institution’s inherent trustworthiness.”

The whole charade also represents an abuse of the climate leadership team’s time and a mockery of B.C.’s claims to leadership during the Paris climate talks, not to mention a tremendous waste of public resources.

How much did the province spend on the climate leadership team process — convening the 17-member team for meetings, carrying out extensive climate modeling to support their deliberations (services that were contracted from the private firm Navius, no doubt at significant expense) and public consultation activities? How many thousands of hours of staff time were spent by ministry personnel to support it all?

B.C.’s new government has committed to more ambitious climate policies than what the previous Liberal government outlined in its non-plan last year. But with the fossil fuel industry accustomed to putting pen to paper on policy and regulation, a great deal of political will is required to move forward. And that ban on corporate donations to political parties? It can’t come soon enough.

   —

Shannon Daub is Associate Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives B.C. Office, and co-director of the Corporate Mapping Project. Zoe Yunker is Zoë is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at the University of Victoria and a research assistant with the Corporate Mapping Project.

This report is published as part of the Corporate Mapping Project, a research and public engagement initiative investigating the power of the fossil fuel industry. The CMP is jointly led by the University of Victoria, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ B.C. and Saskatchewan offices, and the Parkland Institute. In March, the project reported on the millions of dollars donated by the fossil fuel industry in recent years to B.C. political parties.  This research is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

DeSmog Canada is a community partner of the Corporate Mapping Project.

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By Jeremy J.Nuttall for The Tyee.

In the hours after the 2014 Mount Polley mine disaster, authorities were already concerned laws had been broken and the premier’s office was worried fallout from the tailing pond breach would “get in the way” of other planned mines, documents provided to The Tyee reveal.

Almost three years after the disaster, and weeks away from a deadline to lay charges under B.C.’s environment act, no charges have been laid and no fines levied.

The government’s initial reaction to the dam’s collapse is revealed in hundreds of pages of emails and other communications obtained through a freedom of information request and provided to The Tyee by Jessica Ross, an independent researcher and member of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.

Ross said she filed the FOI request almost three years ago and only received the documents July 4.

An email exchange between Staff Sgt. Kelly Dahl of the province’s Conservation Officer Service major investigations unit and Sgt. Richard Lebeuf of the Williams Lake RCMP documents raised concerns laws had been broken.

“From the Ministry of Environment's perspective — It appears there are several possible violations of environmental legislation that may have occurred related to this event,” Dahl wrote. He also expressed concern the federal Fisheries Act may have been broken.

Meanwhile, as officials assessed the damage done, some government staff were working to manage public reaction to the spill.

Premier Christy Clark’s then deputy chief of staff Michele Cadario raised concerns other proposed mine developments could be slowed by the disaster.

“Was there anything that could have been done that wasn’t to prevent this situation — are there better standards employed elsewhere that we should look at?” she asked in an email to a host of staffers, including communications people.

“We have a few new mines coming on stream and we don’t want anything to get in the way of that,” she wrote.

RELATED: British Columbians Saddled With $40 Million Clean-Up Bill as Imperial Metals Escapes Criminal Charges

Cadario and other government staffers raised the need to communicate with First Nations in the area and any impact on drinking water.

But they also made an effort to help mine owner Imperial Metals’ public relations efforts after the spill.

The FOI documents show government staff were concerned the company had not been heard from hours after the spill. One email from John Paul Fraser, head of government communications, said the company silence was “looking bad.”

Cadario offered a solution.

“I know the owner of Imperial Metals — I’ll text him and see if he can stir someone up,” Cadario wrote.

The company’s owner, Murray Edwards, has donated more than $400,000 to the BC Liberal Party since 2005 through Imperial Metals and his oil sands company. Edwards also hosted a private fundraiser in Alberta that raised $1 million for the party’s 2013 election campaign.

.@ChristyClarkbc Worried #MountPolley Spill Would Harm New Mine Construction, New Docs Show via @TheTyee #bcpoli https://t.co/59qXtUUvhC

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 17, 2017

After speaking to Edwards, Cadario wanted to ensure the company’s statement was being noticed by the public.

“I spoke to the owner Murray Edwards and he said an NR [new release] has gone out — Twitter traffic seems to still say that they haven’t heard from IM — Has that now been rectified?”

In another brief email Clark’s then director of communications Ben Chin said he had spoken to “Jas” about impending TV news coverage of the spill. The reference, following earlier emails on Global TV’s coverage, appears to refer to Jas Johal, then a Global reporter.

“Just finished talking to Jas… it’s just a heads up, not an interview request. He tells me the pictures at 6 will be very graphic. Imperial should get out in front,” Chin wrote.

Johal left journalism weeks later to work in communications for the BC LNG alliance. He was elected as a Liberal MLA for Richmond-Queensborough in May’s provincial election.

The dam containing the tailings pond at the Mount Polley copper and gold mine failed on Aug. 4, 2014, sending more than 25 million cubic metres of waste water into nearby Quesnel Lake and surrounding streams. The mine is about 60 kilometres northeast of Williams Lake.

Investigators concluded the failure was the result of a design flaw.

Cleaning up the disaster cost the province $40 million.

A private prosecution of Imperial Metals and the B.C. government by MiningWatch was blocked in March by the federal government, which cited ongoing investigations. 

Image: Mount Polley mine disaster. Photo: Cariboo Regional District via Youtube

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BC Hydro officials and members of Premier Christy Clark and Energy Minister Bill Bennett’s offices were all involved in a coordinated attempt to discredit DeSmog Canada’s reporting on the $8.8 billion Site C hydroelectric dam, according to documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests.

The documents detail a flurry of e-mails following a DeSmog Canada story that quoted former BC Hydro CEO Marc Eliesen saying that Site C was proceeding without due diligence, would lead to escalating hydro rate increases and was “scheduled to become a big white elephant,” a story later referenced by the New York Times.

BC Hydro officials were concerned that major B.C. media would pick up on the DeSmog Canada story, based largely on a BC Hydro progress report to the B.C. Utilities Commission. That report noted that Site C had fallen behind on four out of seven key milestones and outlined project risks and reasons why Site C had spent more money than anticipated by the end of last March, while saying that the project’s overall forecast still remained on track.

“This is expected to generate media interest,” Craig Fitzsimmons, BC Hydro’s manager of communications and issues management for Site C, flagged in e-mails to the Premier’s office and Bennett’s office, informing them that numbers in the article came from the Crown corporation’s own report.

The Premier’s office directed BC Hydro to respond to the article immediately even though it was the start of the Canada Day long weekend, a sign of the top priority Clark’s team has placed on controlling the story line on the Site C dam, the most expensive publicly funded project in B.C.’s history.

Two days later, internal Hydro e-mails show, BC Hydro CEO Jessica McDonald took aim at an opinion editorial that had been published more than one month earlier in the print and online editions of The Province newspaper.

The opinion piece was based entirely on a DeSmog Canada story published the previous day about BC Hydro’s ongoing civil law suit against some of the Peace Valley farmers and First Nations members involved in the Rocky Mountain Fort winter camp, which delayed Site C clear-cutting of a B.C. heritage site for two months. The piece quoted the head of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association who called the lawsuit, which seeks financial damages for BC Hydro from individuals, a matter of “grave concern” because of its potential to curtail freedom of expression.  

McDonald, saying erroneously that the opinion piece had changed a month after publication and now contained “commentary that is even more misleading than before” asked top staff if it were possible to “dust off” a one-month-old unpublished BC Hydro letter to the editor of The Province and “create a new piece that hits back.”

“I feel this is really important as we head into the Paddle for the Peace which is focused on the Boon’s property next weekend and will be very focused on stopping the federal authorizations based on our supposed unfairness,” wrote McDonald.

McDonald was referring to Ken and Arlene Boon, two of the Peace Valley farmers named in Hydro’s civil law suit, whose third-generation farmland and home were expropriated by BC Hydro in December for a Site C highway relocation. At the time the e-mail was written, BC Hydro was waiting for federal authorizations for Site C that were subsequently granted by the Trudeau government, even though First Nations leaders had requested that the permits be withheld.

According to the internal Hydro e-mails, McDonald said she wanted a statement drafted to say that information in the opinion piece was “inaccurate.” She also wanted her staff to make sure BC Hydro was “closely monitoring” some DeSmog Canada articles and to flag when there were updates.

McDonald wanted it to be made clear that BC Hydro supports freedom of expression and is taking legal action only to prevent people from physically blockading work on the project. But the documents also suggest that BC Hydro wanted to do more.

“I talked to Jessica and she would like to hit Sarah Cox hard for never contacting us for an interview on the issue, continuing to ignore our input, and then ramping up the rhetoric,” said an e-mail written by Danielle Van Huizen, a senior business advisor in McDonald’s office.

That prompted a quick reply from BC Hydro’s Site C spokesperson Dave Conway, who informed colleagues that Hydro had indeed been contacted for comment three times over a five-day period, by e-mail and phone.

Screenshots of documents obtained through Freedom of Information legislation indicating BC Hydro President Jessica McDonald would like to hit DeSmog Canada contributor Sarah Cox "hard" for her writing on Site C. 

“We will have to be careful what we write and be sure legal has a look at it,” advised Van Huizen in another email.

Two days later, BC Hydro issued a news release, approved by Bennett’s office and including text from a letter to the editor approved by the Premier’s office, saying there were “inaccuracies” in the five-week old Province opinion piece, and also saying that the piece had been “posted” more than one month later than its actual publication date.

That followed closely on the heels of a BC Hydro news release, approved by both the Premier’s office and Bennett’s office, which attempted to discredit DeSmog Canada’s story about Hydro’s progress report to the utilities commission, saying it contained “inaccurate statements.” 

BC Hydro President Jessica McDonald would like to hit DeSmog contributor Sarah Cox “hard” for her writing on #SiteC https://t.co/4GNzCYzNyG

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) January 17, 2017

At that point, DeSmog Canada sent a registered letter to Simi Heer, Hydro’s manager of media relations and issues management, asking BC Hydro to identify any factual inaccuracies so that they could be corrected. Heer, who later left BC Hydro, did not respond to the letter, or to e-mails and a phone call. BC Hydro has never contacted DeSmog Canada directly to request any story corrections.

Dozens of pages were redacted from BC Hydro’s 1,600-page FOI response on the grounds that they “were penned for the purpose of seeking or providing legal advice.” Other pages, including parts of e-mails written by McDonald about the opinion piece, were redacted on the grounds that releasing the full e-mails would constitute an unreasonable invasion of a third party’s personal privacy.

The FOI documents also reveal how top officials in the Premier’s office and Bennet’s office control other media relations regarding the Site C dam, as reported by the Vancouver Sun last week based on a DeSmog Canada FOI to the Premier’s office that is now publicly available.

Construction of the Site C Dam on the Peace River. Photo: Garth Lenz/DeSmog Canada

The Premier’s office and Bennett’s office directed the timing of various Site C announcements, including an announcement about the completion of a temporary bridge across the Peace River, which Bennett did not want BC Hydro to make too close to an April increase in hydro rates.

Both offices were also involved in the timing for an announcement about the completion of the $470 million lodge for Site C construction workers, which cost BC Hydro customers almost as much as Clark’s pre-election pledge to spend $500 million on affordable housing projects to help alleviate the Lower Mainland’s housing crisis.

The offices also vetted a BC Hydro press release, which included quotes from Clark and Bennett, announcing that a $470 million contract had been awarded to Voith Hydro Inc. to supply turbines and generators for the Site C dam.

According to Luc Bernier, a Canadian expert in Crown corporations, BC Hydro should have more independence from the government to ensure that sound decisions are being made.

Bernier said it is not unusual for governments to be kept apprised of developments on large publicly funded projects like Site C, and to control and to supervise these projects to a certain extent, because they are highly visible.

But directing day-to-day communications can lead to decisions being made for political reasons and not because they are in the best interests of the Crown corporation, said Bernier, who holds the Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management at the University of Ottawa and is the former head of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. 

“For the proper functioning of Crown corporations it should be more independent. We do put these organizations further away from politics to make sure the main reason to exist — in this case to produce electricity — is not done for political reasons.”

Public sector management expert David Zussman said the question of how independent Crown corporations should be from governments is a contentious issue right across the country.

“In recent years in particular there’s been a distancing of the Crowns from the government,” said Zussman, a former dean of the University of Ottawa’s School of Management and previous commissioner of the Public Service Commission of Canada.

“The trends today I would say are for greater independence of Crown corporations.” Hydro Quebec, for instance, is a far more independent entity than it was 30 years ago and Zussman said to the best of his knowledge it has “almost nothing to do with the government” today.

To achieve good governance, Zussman said Crown corporations “should operate independently from government on a day to day basis,” adding that what exactly that means is open to interpretation.

The FOI request to the Premier’s office also asked for e-mails and documents related to Site C’s most recent budget and timeline, but that information was not forthcoming. Fourteen pages of the response were redacted.

Screenshot of a consent order compelling BC Hydro to release documents requested by DeSmog Canada via Freedom of Information legislation.

One internal Hydro e-mail from Michael Savidant, BC Hydro’s Site C commercial manager, addressed Site C project risks outlined in Hydro’s progress report and referenced in DeSmog Canada’s story. But Savidant’s points were not included in Hydro’s news release about the story or in BC Hydro’s list of key messages, vetted by Bennett’s office, for any other media inquiries about the report.

“On the potential for cost overruns — yes if those things happen there will be cost increases,” Savidant wrote to Fitzsimmons and Chris Sandve, Bennett’s former chief of staff who is now BC Hydro’s director of policy and reporting.

“Those risks exist on any project. We disclosed them in the Business Case and at the JRP [Joint Review Panel hearings on Site C]. The key is to highlight that we have contingency to cover most items, and a project reserve to cover the rest.”

The internal e-mails also detail BC Hydro’s concerted efforts to craft messaging for any members of the media who expressed interest in following several DeSmog Canada stories about Site C, including a story about Hydro’s $175 million plan to truck at-risk bull trout upstream past the dam for 100 years when up to 40 percent of the fish are expected to perish in the dam’s turbines while migrating back downstream.

One internal Hydro document with a weekly Site C public affairs summary listed Freedom of Information requests as one of the “on-going risks” to the project. “The Project continues to get a lot of Freedom-of-Information Requests related to various issues. The FOIs can be expected to end up in the public realm, usually through media reports,” the document noted.

BC Hydro only responded to the FOI request, made last August, after a complaint was filed with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) when the Crown Corporation missed a legal deadline for delivering the documents.

The commissioner issued a consent order, compelling BC Hydro to release the information.

Image: Premier Christy Clark, flanked by BC Hydro President Jessica McDonald and Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett, at a Site C contract announcement. Photo: Province of B.C. via Flickr  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The University of Alberta and TransAlta, a major Alberta utility company and coal producer, struck an agreement for the company to pay the university $54,000 to research the health impacts of coal-fired power plants near Edmonton, according to documents obtained by DeSmog Canada.

When TransAlta published the research — a study entitled Investigation of Fine Particulate Matter Characteristics and Sources in Edmonton, Alberta — on its website last spring the company initially stated it had sponsored the work, co-authored by Warren Kindzierski and fellow University of Alberta professor Aynul Bari.

But that sponsorship disclaimer was abruptly scrubbed from the company’s website.

Documents released to DeSmog Canada through Freedom of Information legislation show TransAlta did indeed enter into a sponsorship agreement with the University of Alberta that provided Kindzierski, as principle investigator, $54,000 to conduct the research.

TransAlta says that although it did provide the funds to the university, the university did not use the funds to support Kindzierski’s research.

“They kept our funds but did not use them towards the study, they redirected them elsewhere,” Stacy Hatcher, spokesperson for TransAlta, told DeSmog Canada.

Hatcher said because TransAlta did provide the funds to the university “we erred on the side of being completely transparent and stating up front that we had paid for it as that had been the offer.”

“It was a mistake on our part not to circle back and correct the news story once we learned the university did not accept the funding,” she added.

The undocumented movement of industry money on university campuses is nothing new.

Private sponsorship agreements, gifts, grants and donations have all been used as ways to financially support research, resulting in what some critics have identified as a problematic purchase of academic credibility by corporations.

In this instance, the question comes down to whether and how private funds are influencing public conversations about coal-fired power generation in Alberta.

Industry-Friendly Study Used to Fight Coal Phase-Out

The study, made available to the public on TransAlta’s site in late 2015, bears the branding of the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health and concludes the high number of coal-fired power plants near the city of Edmonton doesn’t negatively impact the health of local residents.

The research has been used by TransAlta to push for an alternative to the Alberta government’s plan to phase-out coal by 2030 (which is no small feat: Alberta uses more coal for power production than all other Canadian provinces combined).

In its submission to the Alberta Climate Change Advisory Panel TransAlta referred to the research as “commissioned independent work through the University of Alberta” that was done “in response to continued unsubstantiated claims that coal-fired generation was a major contributor to Edmonton’s air quality events, and a rationale for the need to accelerate the retirement of coal units.”

“You will see that the research shows minimal airshed impacts from operation of coal-fired generation to the west,” the submission read.

The research has also been used by vocal coal advocates, such as Robin Campbell, president of the Canadian Association of Coal, to argue against a coal phase-out.

TransAlta owns and operates Canada’s largest surface strip coal mine, the Highvale Mine. The 12,600 hectare coal mine, managed by TransAlta’s wholly-owned subsidiary Sunhills Mining, produces 13 million tonnes of thermal grade coal each year which is used to power three of TransAlta’s power stations. Since 2006, TransAlta stopped mining operations at two additional coal mines and as a result now purchases coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana.

TransAlta (burns coal and) paid U of A to conduct a health study (about coal). But there’s no connection, OK? https://t.co/SimArg2eOH #ableg

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 8, 2016

Corporate Sponsorship Agreements Commonplace

Sponsorship agreements between the University of Alberta and TransAlta are commonplace, Hatcher said: “TransAlta has a relationship with the university, and we have provided non-directed funding in the past for research and academic projects.”

Documents released to DeSmog Canada confirm this, showing TransAlta provided at least another $175,000 to the university between 2013 and 2015 through additional sponsorship arrangements.

However, the retroactive decision to ‘redirect’ the Kindzierski study funds raises questions about transparency and accountability.

The university’s Research Services Office, which appears as a signatory on the TransAlta sponsorship agreement, said it could not provide comment or release information regarding sponsorships.

A woman at the Research Services Office said simply, “We would not release any information to you of any kind” and recommended all inquiries be directed to the principle investigator: Kindzierski.

“No funds were expended [on that study],” Kindzierski told DeSmog Canada. “They were used after the study was done to support a post doctorate RA (research assistant) on other research activities.”

“Are you familiar with soft dollar funded positions? Why don’t you go ahead and learn about that?” Kindzierski said during a phone interview.

‘Soft money’ positions at universities are those funded by grants, awards and other forms of sponsorship that are usually impermanent and must be regularly sought after through application processes. Alternately, ‘hard money’ positions usually refer to tenure-track positions that are funded by tuition, endowments, government funding and philanthropy.

“All faculties, all programs, all departments at all universities have soft dollar funded positions, totally above board and everything,” he added.

Kindzierski said the research, which was published online without going through a full peer-reviewed process, has since been peer-reviewed, accepted and published at three “high-quality impact journals.”

When asked which journals the research appeared in, he responded, “I can name them but I have no desire to give them to you.”

“Go search. That’s good homework for you.”

“You’re no different than a reporter that is too lazy to find this stuff themselves,” Kindzierski said during the interview.

A similar paper by Kindzierski recently appeared in the journal Environmental Pollution, a peer-reviewed publication, but DeSmog Canada was unable to find the exact study in question published anywhere other than TransAlta’s website.

Documentation released to DeSmog Canada via Freedom of Information shows Kindzierski sent TransAlta a proposal of the study before research was undertaken. Records show this proposal was sent to Don Wharton, TransAlta’s vice president of policy and sustainable development, at TransAlta’s request in May 2015. The sponsorship agreement was signed in July 2015. The contents of the study proposal, sent from Kindzierski to Wharton, were redacted in the released documents.

Coal Pollution Still Dangerous to Health, Physician Says

Critics have called the independence of the study into question, saying TransAlta’s planned sponsorship could have introduced bias in the research questions pursued.

“I think after they published it they realized [there were going to be] a lot of people making a stink that there was a conflict of interest,” Joe Vipond, physician with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), told DeSmog Canada.

“The optics were quite bad as far as bias is concerned in funding the study and that’s why they moved to make the money trail less obvious.”

Vipond is concerned about the way the study has been used to influence public debate about coal-fired power plants.

“It really distorts the conversation,” he said.

“I work in the medical field… and there is so much evidence of how funding and bias impacts conclusions in the scientific literature in health.”

But, he added, the average person isn’t taught to look as critically at this kind of literature as health professionals are.

“I think it’s very hard. People underestimate the power of money.”

He added that working in the medical field also exposes him to evidence that coal pollution affects respiratory health.

The Kindzierski study goes to great lengths to say pollution in the Edmonton airshed isn’t due to coal-fired power plants, Vipond said.

Recently Vipond co-authored a report, Breathing in the Benefits, released by the Pembina Institute, the Asthma Society, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Lung Association, that estimated the phase-out of coal by 2030 in Alberta would avoid approximately 600 premature deaths, 500 emergency room visits, 80,000 asthma episodes, two million days of respiratory difficulty for individuals and nearly $3 billion in health benefits.

A previous report from the same group of organizations, A Costly Diagnosis: Subsidizing Coal Power with Albertans’ Health, found pollution from coal combustion affects respiratory and cardiovascular health as well as the central nervous system. The report says exposure to these pollutants can result in chronic respiratory illness and premature death.

“There is such a broad mix of emissions that come from coal: SOx, NOx, particulate matter 2.5 and mercury,” Vipond said.

“Then there’s a whole host of others like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and benzenes. That mix comes out of the stack and there is a lot of evidence for how [those pollutants] pollute lungs and the evidence on the impacts to cardiovascular health is even better.”

Particulate matter 2.5 is so fine, Vipond said, it gets into your lungs and can dissolve immediately into the bloodstream.

Andrew Read, environmental policy analyst with the Pembina Institute and contributor to the Breathing in the Benefits report, told DeSmog Canada there are no safe levels of particulate matter 2.5.

“Particulate matter doesn’t have a lower threshold where health impacts aren’t identified,” he said. “There is no argument that burning coal for electricity does not have substantial health impacts.”

Read added that reality should influence how we think about the future of coal-fired power.

Source: Pembina Institute

“The fact that there is no safe level of exposure to pollutants that are emitted by coal electricity is really important to consider,” he said. “If we expect to grow the economy and add industry to the province we have to remove some of these sources of emissions.”

The Kindzierski study produced for TransAlta “was really a political piece,” Read said.

“That’s the main frustration with the Kindzierski study — he could have added to the conversation or contributed in a way that added to the discussion but didn’t.”

Vipond said a presentation by Kindzierski to the Air and Waste Management Association found the short-term presence of particulate matter in the atmosphere resulted in fewer hospital visits for heart attacks.

“The conclusion was breathing coal-fired pollution is good for your health,” Vipond said.

“My feeling on the matter is that people who already have an agenda then go to find evidence that goes to back up that agenda. I think that’s true of humanity: it’s what we do.”

Vipond published a rebuttal of the Kindzierski study, saying there were major flaws in the methodology, including using limited air quality inputs and wind pattern information.

“I was annoyed [Kindzierski’s study] was out there and annoyed no one was challenging it.”

Research Shows Industry Funding Influences Academic Research

While industry funding doesn’t necessarily influence scientific research, a broad survey of research shows that it often does, according to Garry Gray, assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria.

“If we just look at the outcomes [of research] — and that’s where we should focus — if we look at meta-analyses of funding, we see this in many areas over and over again, the source of funding does matter,” Gray told DeSmog Canada.

Gray spent three years as a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard’s Law School studying unethical behaviour in public interest institutions and conducting interviews with researchers in the field of public health and medicine.

His research (which he presents cogently in this TEDx talk) found that, yes, where research money comes from does indeed influence research outcomes.

“There is definitely a funding effect bias that takes place in research, especially when you can show where the funding sources are coming from.”

Gray’s research found that in often minor and subtle ways, researchers found ways to make their findings palatable to their funders.

“It doesn’t mean people were doing unethical research,” Gray said, “it means they were maybe framing their questions in certain ways or asking question A and not question B.”

Gray added universities are trying to better manage the problem of conflict of interest funding, but said they stop short of actually eliminating those funding relationships.

“I think there are a lot of problems today around research funding relationships,” he said.

Many of those ethical problems are not fully resolved by simply asking researchers to sign conflict of interest disclosure forms, he added.

There is often little transparency in how universities accept funding, Gray said, adding that can complicate the issue of public trust.

“Trust is definitely at stake,” he said. “There is this idea that universities are independent and this idea they are, for the most part, serving the public good. So there is this more implicit trust that we have for a project that comes out of the university.”

Yet with increasing amounts of private funds on university campuses, researchers may not be asking “the tougher questions” that are likely to benefit the general public.

“The question is, if we continue to shift funding models, who is going to ask those questions that are not going to be of interest to companies and industry and those types of funders?”

Laurie Adkin, associate professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of political science, told DeSmog Canada there are a lot of concerns about universities’ increasing reliance on corporate funds.

“It has been rather difficult to document the amount of corporate funding for individual researchers and their projects,” Adkins, who is a researcher with the Corporate Mapping Project, said.

“Partly because that information isn’t published anywhere and partly because it is difficult to record unless there is some sort of public announcement made.”

A request for comment from Samantha Pearson, director of corporate and foundation relations at the University of Alberta, went unanswered.

As a part of her research Adkin maps funding of energy-related research at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary.

There is a significant amount of funding from the fossil fuel industry but also from the federal government at the University of Alberta, Adkin said, adding “a lot of that funding has been going into social licence research or prolonging the life of fossil fuels rather than going into renewable energies.”

“Of course in Alberta the University of Alberta has, at least under its previous president, billed itself as a flagship university for fossil fuel research,” she said.

The University of Alberta used to report industry funding but has since merged that category with funding from public institutions in its annual reporting, so there is no easy way to decipher where funding is coming from.

“You don’t know what faculty is getting what share or what research is getting funded,” she said.

Adkin said the question of the appropriateness of this practice is never raised.

“This is viewed as the model for what everyone should be doing.”

University of Alberta TransAlta Sponsorship Agreement for Kindzierski Coal Study FOI 2016 by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

Update: This piece was updated Thursday, November 10 at 11:46 a.m. to reflect TransAlta’s use of Kindzierski’s research to push for an alternative to Alberta’s Climate Change Plan, not to explicitly argue against the coal phase-out.

With files from Michael Fisher. 

Image: Emissions from a coal-fired power plant chimney in Germany. Photo: Patrick via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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This article originally appeared on Sean Holman's Unknowable Country.

Alberta’s freedom of information law is weak and underused. Yet, in an election where one of the most important issues is government accountability, there has been surprisingly little discussion about reforming that law — despite a proposed policy change that could further threaten the public’s right to know.

Alberta has historically been a stranger to freedom of information legislation, which allows access to internal government documents. That access is important because the public can then find out things the officials they elect and the institutions they pay for don’t want them to find out.

But, according to the Globe and Mail, Peter Lougheed — Alberta’s premier between 1971 and 1985 — claimed such legislation was unnecessary because his was one of North America’s most open administrations. His successor Don Getty also rejected and later delayed introducing an access law, stating government information was already “made available by the wheelbarrow loads” in the legislature.

“We mail it to people. It’s provided on a day-to-day basis,” he added.

But there were many outside government who disputed such claims. For example, in 1992, the Calgary Herald reported the Association of Alberta Taxpayers delivered 20,000 coupons to Getty’s office “from individual citizens demanding an information law.”

At the time, association spokesperson Kevin Avram was quoted by the newspaper as saying, “The most difficult government to get information from is right here in Edmonton.”

Getting that information became easier when Ralph Klein’s government finally introduced a freedom of information law in April 1994, making the province the second to last jurisdiction in North America to do so.

But it remains an access laggard.

According to a 2012 report from the Centre for Law and Democracy, Alberta tied with New Brunswick and the federal government for having the worst freedom of information law in the country. In that report, the centre stated the loopholes in Alberta’s legislation create “enormous amount of wiggle room for recalcitrant public officials who would seek to avoid disclosure of embarrassing information.”

In addition, it costs $25 just to file a freedom of information request in Wildrose Country. In Canada, the two territories are the only other jurisdictions with that high of an application fee. And that price tag doesn’t include the additional costs often associated with actually obtaining those records.

I can’t help but think that Alberta’s application fee is one reason why the province’s access law is so underused.

According to the most recent statistics available, in fiscal 2012/13 Alberta government ministries received 60 general freedom of information requests per 100,000 people in the province. By comparison, in Ontario, where the application fee for those requests is $5, that number was 87 in 2012. And, in British Columbia, where there is no charge, that number was 106 in 2012/13.

But, troublingly, Premier Jim Prentice has a plan that could further suppress such access requests in Alberta even further.

Right now, an individual who files a freedom of information request is the only one who receives the records responsive to it. That means reporters and others can get scoops from making those requests — a reward for the considerable time, effort and sometimes money spent on them.

But, in February, CBC News revealed the premier moved to take those scoops away by “personally” ordering government to post responses online for everyone to see, including competing reporters. And if you don’t think that’s a disincentive, just think how you would feel if someone else could constantly claim credit for work you were responsible for.

Prentice’s order has yet to be carried out.

Nevertheless, it’s another reason why opposition parties should be promising to reform the province’s freedom of information legislation, a law that’s benefitted them during the election campaign.

For example, thanks to that law, Wildrose found out the government had spent more than $950 million on sole-source contracts in fiscal 2013/14. Similarly, the Alberta NDP learned of “skyrocketing” ambulance service delays in Calgary and Edmonton.

Both revelations were used to attack the Tories on the campaign trail, where — according to a telephone survey of 758 Albertans conducted for CBC News by the polling firm Return On Insight — accountability is the second most important issue for voters.

Yet the platforms for the Alberta Party, the NDP and the Alberta Liberals don’t include a word about strengthening the province’s freedom of information law. Only Wildrose’s platform promises such a change, while the Greens have a plank that commits them to a “radical overhaul of rules around transparency and accountability.”

Nor have journalists talked much about the need for reform either, perhaps because they believe too many believe Canadians don’t care about that issue — a self-defeating notion, even if it may sometimes be a truthful one.

But what all this amounts to is, at the very least, a missed opportunity to change that indifference, raising awareness among Albertans about why their information rights are important and how those rights can prevent another 44 years of unaccountable governments in this province.

Image Credit: Charlotte Kinzie via Flickr

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Documents obtained by DeSmog Canada reveal that Canada’s Ministry of Environment vetoed an interview request on toxins in fur-bearing animals in the oilsands, even though the federal scientist was “media trained and interested in doing the interview.”

The Environment Canada scientist in question, Philippe Thomas, had asked members of the Alberta Trappers Association to send him samples of fur-bearing animals caught across Alberta in 2012. Thomas needed a broad range of samples to gain deeper insight into the contaminant load in animals living near the oilsands.

In late 2012, DeSmog Canada submitted a request to interview Thomas, and provided several written questions to Environment Canada to review.

Documents obtained via Access to Information legislation show that pre-scripted responses were prepared for Thomas should the interview be approved at the upper levels. The request was approved at the deputy general level, but denied in the office of former Environment Minister Peter Kent.

The request was also sent to the Privy Council Office for review, but was denied by the minister before requiring a decision by the prime minister’s top-level advisors.

Media requests involving controversial subjects such as the Alberta oilsands, climate change or species at risk are often subject to upper level political review and are routinely approved or denied at the ministerial level or in the Privy Council Office.

Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault is currently investigating the 'muzzling of scientists' after a formal request was made by the Environmental Law Centre at the University of Victoria and citizen advocacy group Democracy Watch. The groups asked the commissioner to investigate “the systematic efforts by the Government of Canada to obstruct the right of the media — and through them, the Canadian public — to timely access to government scientists.” That investigation is ongoing. 

Sean Holman, founder of Public Eye and professor of journalism at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said denied requests of this kind remind Canadians just how frustrated and undemocratic our access to information process really is.

“We have a Father Knows Best approach to government in Canada,” Holman told DeSmog Canada.

“Our elected and unelected officials have vast powers to withhold information from the citizenry — whether it’s because they feel that’s in the public interest or their partisan interest.”

“That’s undemocratic,” he said, adding, “but that’s why they feel they have the right to violate our right to know – frustrating access to information we have paid for.”

The internal documents from Environment Canada also show personnel were asked to keep DeSmog Canada’s previous reporting on oilsands’ science “in mind when preparing” responses to questions.

According to Holman, “it’s understandable communications staff would want to know who is asking for information from the government…from a public relations standpoint.”

“But,” he added, “from a democratic standpoint, do we want communications staff to be providing different or better access to that information depending on the requester?”

In doing so, what Environment Canada staff appear to be saying, Holman said, “is that not everyone has the same right to hold government to account since knowledge is a necessary precursor to that process.”

The research, carried out as part of the Joint Canada-Alberta Plan for Oil Sands Monitoring, is the first of its kind, and brings to light the lack of data to date regarding contaminants in fur-bearing animals — some of which are a source of food for communities and First Nations — in the oilsands area.

Environment Canada told DeSmog Canada the request to speak with Thomas “could not be accommodated.”

When pressed for a reason why, Environment Canada staff responded, “due to the nature of your request, a written response was more appropriate.”

The written responses provided to DeSmog Canada were not attributed to Thomas, however. In response to questions regarding the authorship of the answers, Environment Canada said “a number of Environment Canada staff contributed.”

Environment Canada confirmed beavers, fishers, martens, lynx and river otters have been tested for naphthenic acid, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and a suite of approximately 28 metals and inorganic compounds, pollutants that “have been identified as contaminants produced as a result of industrial activity in the Oil Sands region.”

Data collected in the samples will be “compared to existing guidelines for human consumption.”

DeSmog Canada is partnering with the Politics of Evidence Working Group to promote Write2Know Week from March 23-27. If you would like to write a letter to Environment Canada regarding the monitoring of contaminants in the oilsands area, and to let scientists know you value their work, visit Write2Know for an easy guide. 

Image Credit: Brandon T. Brown Nature Photography

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“I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

That was how some journalists seemed to respond last week to an open letter I wrote about how government communications staff are helping to kill democracy.

But, if we want to save it, we’re going to need to do more than just throw open our windows, stick our heads out and yell about the non-answers we often get from those spin doctors.

In that letter, which was published in J-Source, The Tyee, DeSmog Canada and the Yukon News, I wrote about how those non-answers are actually a refusal to “provide the public with information. And if the public doesn’t know what their government is actually doing, it can continue doing things the public wouldn’t want it to do.”

Those words were shared on Facebook and retweeted hundreds of times, with one reporter in the Yukon stating, “I think it’s fair to say the frustration levels of journalists in this country are rising.”

That frustration has been well-earned.

Compared to the United States, Canadian governments release fewer public records that reporters can use to find stories that don’t come from a news release or news event.

Our governments also confound access to the records they don’t release by having weakfreedom of information laws.

And many public bodies have policies that restrict or prohibit their employees from speaking with reporters.

That means communications departments (the spin factories and propaganda shops of government) can be one of the only sources journalists have for timely information.

Opacity is winning the war against transparency. And if Canadian journalists want to turn the tide, they must do more in the fight against that secrecy – something some American news outlets expressly allow their reporters to do.

For example, in a recent statement to Politico, a New York Times spokesperson stated the newspaper is “not neutral on the issue of press freedom. We have vigorously opposed actions that inhibit legitimate reporting.”

Meanwhile, National Public Radio’s ethics handbook, which prohibits political activities, makes an exception for “issues directly related to our journalistic mission (e.g. First Amendment rights, the Freedom of Information Act, a federal ‘shield law’).”*

Here in Canada, I simply recommended in my open letter that journalists should let our audiences know when spin doctors don’t respond to our questions, provide non-answers or interfere with attempts to interview public officials.

Perhaps journalists should even include that protocol in the emails we send to government spokespeople, letting them know that we also won’t be using their non-answers for the sake of false balance?

In some way ways, that would be similar to David Carr‘s approach to reporting. Speaking to National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, the late New York Times media critic explained:

If it’s going to be a hard story, one of the things I always say is, ‘This is going to be a really serious story and I’m asking very serious questions and it behoves you to think it through and really work on answering and defending yourself…And if they don’t engage, I just tell them, ‘Well you know what, you better put the nut cup on because this isn’t going to be pleasant for anyone.’

If we did the same thing with government communications staff and their tactics, they won’t surprised when a reporter such as the Georgia Straight’s Travis Lupick thinks about writing a sentence such as this: “A [Canadian Border Services Agency] spokesperson repeatedly ignored questions and read unrelated bullet points written by an anonymous spin doctor.”

And that way, maybe we won’t hear those unrelated bullet points at all.

Postscript: Last week, CBC Daybreak South succeeded in getting Andrew Wilkinson, the minister responsible for British Columbia’s spin doctors, to address complaints about the state of government communications (including my open letter).

Provincial flacks “initially declined” to respond to those complaints. But Wilkinson made an appearance on Daybreak South after the program tried contacting “each and every MLA” in its listening area about that issue.

You can listen to the interview for yourself on Soundcloud. But suffice it say Wilkinson, somewhat appropriately, appeared to have his own talking points for that conversation. So, just as appropriately, I’ve filed freedom of information requests to obtain them.

SQUIBS (FEDERAL)

• The Canadian Press reports a new government policy requires all possible breaches of cabinet confidentiality – “however slight” – to be “immediately reported to the Prime Minister’s Office or officials in the Privy Council Office, the government’s bureaucratic nerve centre.”

• In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen, Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Fréchette said he wants a “coercive baseball bat” that will force government departments to provide him with economic and legislative data “on a timely and free basis.”

• CBC News reports, “A former top adviser to then-Employment Minister Jason Kenney has had his knuckles rapped by the federal ethics watchdog for accepting gala tickets from companies and interest groups registered to lobby his own department.” During that investigation, Ethics and Conflict of Interest Commissioner Mary Dawson also found the adviser, Michael Bonner, “could not provide me with any emails related to my examination because he had deleted them, as his usual practice was to delete emails every two weeks. He added that deleted emails of ministerial staff remain on the server for about four weeks, but are then lost forever as they are not ‘archived.'” (hat tip: Mike de Souza)

• Greenpeace Canada’s climate and energy campaign Keith Stewart has two suggestions for the bureaucrats running the system that allows Canadians to file access to information requests online. First: “Why not let us set up accounts so we don’t have to re-enter all my deets each time?” Second: “It’d be awesome if the receipt for the $5 fee included the text of our ATIP request.”

• The Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin writes that even though Stephen Harper “may well hold some sort of record for prime ministerial secrecy and attempts to stifle access,” many of his predecessors have also “held the fourth estate in low regard.” (hat tip: Ian Bron)

• Harper isn’t known for “being terribly accessible to journalists,” reports the Huffington Post. Nevertheless, he sat down for an interview with Costco Connection, the “lifestyle magazine for Costco members” – something that “raised some eyebrows on Twitter.”

• Vice Canada reports the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has denied an access request for the amount of money it paid to cellphone and Internet providers to informally obtain customers’ personal information. Such informal requests were deemed unconstitutional following a June 2014 Supreme Court of Canada ruling. (hat tip: CJ Ciaramella)

• The Canadian Press’s Steve Rennie tweets that a recent access to information requests yielded 15 pages from the Privy Council Office. But the only page that wasn’t exempted was the one with the Government of Canada’s logo.

SQUIBS (PROVINCIAL)

• The Toronto Star reports Ontario still lacks a “standard notification system” to alert journalists when court-ordered publication bans are being considered.

• The Vancouver Sun reports, “Poultry marketing boards are refusing to release biosecurity audits of farms after the avian flu outbreak in the Fraser Valley citing, in part, the potential for farmers to be targeted by animal rights activists.”

• The BC NDP has introduced a Whistleblowers Protection Act that would safeguard “people reporting government mismanagement, negligence or wrong-doing. It also calls for more routine public disclosure of government operations.” As an opposition private member’s bill, the Act has almost no chance of passing the province’s legislature.

• CBC News reports New Brunswick’s access commissioner Anne Bertrand has launched one of two investigations into “controversial trips to Larry’s Gulch, the government-owned fishing lodge…The controversy started when a newspaper editor accepted a free trip to Larry’s Gulch in 2013 with Daniel Allain, the chief executive officer of NB Liquor.” Bertrand is looking into whether documents related to that trip were “deliberately altered before being released.”

• “Ontario’s independent budget watchdog is finally being unleashed – 21 months after the New Democrats forced the Liberals to create the post,” according to the Toronto Star.

• In response to a freedom of information request by freelancer Bob Mackin, the British Columbia government writes there were no briefing notes or issue notes prepared for the province’s transportation minister when he announced the delay of a major transit project.

SQUIBS (LOCAL)

• The City of Winnipeg’s administration is refusing to “make public any of the reports” that justify the need to “expropriate 20 acres of land it sold to a developer four years ago,” according to the Winnipeg Free Press.

Have a news tip about about the state of democracy, openness and accountability in Canada? You can email me at this address.

* = I am indebted to an article by The Atlantic’s David Graham which cites NPR’s impartiality policy, as well as the New York Times spokesperson’s quote. All the credit for finding that article goes to my department’s librarian Margy MacMillan.

This article originally appeared on Sean Holman's Unknowable Country.

Image Credit: Eric via Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Dear government spin doctor,

I am working on a story about how the job you’re doing is helping to kill Canada’s democracy.

I know that your role, as a so-called communications professional, is to put the best spin on what the government is or isn’t doing.

That means you often don’t respond the questions I ask, you help elected officials do the same thing and you won’t let me talk to those who actually have the answers.

While this may work out very well for you, it doesn’t work out so well for my audience who, by the way, are taxpayers, voters and citizens.

So your refusal to provide me with information is actually a refusal to provide the public with information.

And if the public doesn’t know what their government is actually doing, it can continue doing things the public wouldn’t want it to do.

That just doesn’t seem very democratic to me. Does it seem democratic to you?

I understand you’re just doing your job.

I did that job before myself before I became a journalist, working as a communications officer for the British Columbia government.

So I don’t think you’re a bad person.

But you should know a few things about me.

My job isn’t to help you put the best spin on what the government is or isn’t doing.

My job is to tell the truth.

And, because that’s my job, you should know a few other things about how I’m going to report this story.

First, if you don’t respond to my questions, I’m going to let my audience know that.

Second, if you respond to my questions with non-answers, I’m going to let my audience know that too.

Third, I’m not going to put those non-answers in my story for the sake of false balance.

That’s because me asking questions about what the government is doing wrong isn’t an opportunity for you to simply tell the public about what government is doing right.

You have a big advertising budget for that.

Instead, it’s an opportunity to explain to the public why the government is or isn’t doing that thing I asked you about.

And, finally, if you refuse, ignore or interfere with my requests to interview public officials, my audience will also find out about that.

This may sound like hardball at best and blackmail at worst. But it’s actually the last and only defense I have against you and your colleagues.

Public relations professionals outnumber journalists more than four to one in this country – and for good reason.

It pays to promote and protect the powerful but it doesn’t pay to hold them to account.

My hope is that more journalists will also start routinely telling their audiences about the strategies and tactics you use to frustrate the public’s right to know.

If that happens then the public might start caring about the damage that’s doing to our democracy.

And, maybe, just maybe you might start rethinking what you are doing.

After all, there was a time when journalists could actually talk to public officials without having someone like you always watching over their shoulder and telling them exactly what to say.

I know it’s a long shot.

But it’s the only shot I can take against the tyranny of your talking points.

Sincerely,

Sean Holman, Journalist

SQUIBS (FEDERAL)

• Maclean’s magazine reports the Department of National Defence is withholding information from the Parliamentary Budget Officer about Operation IMPAC – Canada’s mission in Iraq – on the grounds of cabinet confidentiality. (hat tip: BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association)

• The National Post reports a Federal Court judge has ruled “media fighting for access to Omar Khadr have failed to show a prison-interview ban was politically motivated and violated their constitutional rights.”

SQUIBS (PROVINCIAL)

• CBC News reports, “Alberta Premier Jim Prentice has personally ordered that documents from all general freedom of information requests be publicly posted, despite serious concerns from the civil servants responsible for implementing the new policy. Critics say the plan – if implemented – represents a major policy change that will seriously undermine the ability of opposition parties and the media to hold the government accountable.”

• “The province is not tracking how many inmates are overdosing in jails across Ontario,” according to the Hamilton Spectator.

• The Vancouver Sun reports, “Soon-to-be mandatory ‘independent’ review boards for tailings dams at B.C. mines may not be answerable to government or open to scrutiny by the public.” The boards were recommended by a government-appointed panel that was struck following the breach of a tailings pond at the Mount Polley Mine.

• The Telegram hopes a committee reviewing Newfoundland and Labrador’s controversial right to know law will recommend a “much needed laissez-faire approach to the release of information.” That committee, led by former premier Clyde Wells, “has missed a couple of promised deadlines. At last check, it was supposed to release its report by the end of January.”

• Kinder Morgan Inc., the company that is looking to expand a pipeline that carries crude oil to the West coast, “has engaged in a protracted fight with the province of British Columbia in an effort to keep its oil spill response plans a secret.” But, according to DeSmog Canada, Kinder Morgan has “willingly disclosed” such plans “south of the border for portions of the pipeline that extend to Washington State.”

• The Globe and Mail reports, “B.C.’s Ministry of Health is withholding the results of scientific research on how oil and gas operations in the province’s northeast communities are affecting human health.” Independent MLA Vicki Huntington’s freedom of information request for that research was denied because its release could be harmful to the financial interests of a public body.

• CBC News reports Saskatchewan’s information commissioner has ruled a 15-page proposal to create a premier’s library in that province can stay secret because it would disclose a cabinet confidence.

• Saksatchewan NDP MLA Warren McCall has told the Regina Leader-Post that the creation of lobbyists registry in that province as proceeding “slower than molasses, uphill, in February.”

• Manitoba’s “Opposition Progressive Conservatives say they’re getting the runaround in finding how much taxpayers have paid to put up at-risk youth in hotels,” according to the Winnipeg Free Press. (hat tip: Ian Bron)

• CBC News reports DemocracyWatch founder Duff Conacher’s concerns that “New Brunswick’s right to information law is weak and the fines for breaking the laws are so low, they are meaningless”

SQUIBS (LOCAL)

• Winnipeg’s interim chief administrative officer has resigned after the mayor claimed he had lost confidence in the bureaucrat. But, according to the Winnipeg Free Press’s Dan Lett, no further details have been provided because the resignation is a personnel matter – a “trump card” that is “played way too often in situations in which government doesn’t want people to know what happened.”

• 24 hours Vancouver’s Kathyrn Marshall writes that White Rock, B.C.’s city council has “voted to scrap question period. Just like that, White Rock has obliterated a hallmark of liberal democracy. White Rock residents will no longer have the opportunity to pose public questions to their elected representatives following council meetings.”

• In October, TransLink – Vancouver’s regional transportation authority – began “re-examining current [freedom of information] practices and exploring options for easing the burden on staff.” That review, which was expected to take three months, was announced in a memo signed by the authority’s then-chief executive officer Ian Jarvis and obtained by freelance journalist Bob Mackin.

• The Vancouver Courier reports, “When the provincial government set the rules for the non-binding plebiscite on a sales tax hike for TransLink expansion, it didn’t include any campaign fundraising or reporting regulations.”

• “Toronto police met the mandated [freedom of information] response deadline of 30 days in 52 per cent of requests last year,” according to the Toronto Star. “That’s nearly a 30 per cent drop from 2005 – when 80 per cent of FOI requests were completed within the 30-day timeframe – and down almost 15 per cent from 2013, which saw a compliance rate of 65 per cent.”

• Alberta’s information commissioner has ruled Cold Lake, Alta. was right to release records that disclosed unit prices and hourly wage rates for the companies responsible for a highway twinning project. According to the Cold Lake Sun, a third party had argued that disclosure was harmful to business interests.

This article originally appeared on Sean Holman's Unknowable Country.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.