This article is re-published with permission from mikedesouza.com

As some of you may know, I’ll be starting a new role in January 2015 as an investigative resources correspondent for Reuters.

Getting access to records about government decisions and policies has long played a key role in the work of many journalists around the world. It will also be a key element for me in the weeks, months and years to come.

So to end off 2014, here are a few examples of some of my recent experiences with government efforts to either release or hide information.

Canada’s information watchdog has noted that the Supreme Court of Canada recognizes access to information as a quasi-constitutional right of all Canadians.

Obtaining access to information is an extension of freedom of expression since it allows the population to be informed and speak about government policies and decisions on how these governments spend public money.

Deleted records at the Canada Revenue Agency

The Canada Revenue Agency took more than a day to answer some basic questions about its decision to delete some instant messaging records of its employees.

You can find my report on this case over here in the Toronto Star.

The CRA declined to answer some of my questions directly, including whether it had verified whether any of the information deleted was of “business value.” By law, all Canadian government organizations are required to preserve records of “business value.”

When I asked some simple follow up questions – including whether any of its senior officials or media officers ever communicate with the minister or with Conservative political staffers in her office using text messages – the CRA called to complain that it wasn’t reasonable for me to ask these questions and expect them to respond within a couple of hours.

The Canada Revenue Agency instructs bureaucrats to delete logs and disable future logging of instant messages of its employees.

More than a week after I first asked questions and requested an interview with its commissioner, the CRA confirmed it was logging Internet activity of its employees – including on their mobile devices – in case it needed this information to review potential cases of misconduct, but that it wasn’t logging their text messages. Why does it keep one set of logs and not the other?

The CRA declined to answer this question.

You can find some of the emails detailing the CRA instructions to delete records of instant messages over here.

Foreign Affairs: This reporter’s question is “undeserving of a response”

Last summer, Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development wasn’t providing a lot of information about its relationship with the American Legislative Exchange Council. The council, also known as ALEC, is a secretive organization. It benefits from charitable status based on its mandate to “educate” U.S. state legislators by connecting them with corporations to draft model pieces of legislation.

A series of high-tech firms including Google left ALEC in recent months because it continued to host discussions of people without scientific credentials that cast doubt about peer-reviewed research showing the link between human activity and climate change.

“I will suggest we decline the two requested interviews.” – John Babcock, spokesman for Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development.

Canadian diplomats have had some exchanges with members of ALEC as part of the federal government’s efforts to promote the oilsands and TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline. But senior diplomats declined to grant interviews, which led me to write a series of detailed questions to the department in writing.

The department sent me some general and vague statements about who Canadian diplomats were meeting and what they were discussing.

In response to questions asking for details about diplomatic discussions with lobbyists on energy issues, a Canadian government spokesman recommended evasive answers before getting feedback from diplomats about whether they had the answers. This spokesman told his colleagues in internal e-mails that he believed I was “attempting to make specious connections.” He also said one of my questions was “undeserving of a response.”

He also suggested declining the interview requests, without even knowing the answers to the questions raised.

One Canadian diplomat also sent an e-mail to other officials in the department asking them to tell the journalist that she was “not available” for an interview.

You can find these internal e-mails here.

Transport Canada’s vacant rail safety positions

Over a span of several weeks, Transport Canada declined to answer a series of basic questions about critical positions that are vacant in its rail safety and dangerous goods divisions – vacancies that appear to date back to at least 2009.

It confirmed it had vacant oversight and inspector positions within its dangerous goods and rail safety divisions but it declined to identify them or even confirm whether it knew exactly how many of these positions were vacant.

After Reuters reported on internal records detailing these vacancies, the federal New Democrats attempted to raise the issue in Parliament.

In response to questions from NDP deputy leader Megan Leslie in the House of Commons, the parliamentary secretary to the transport minister, Jeff Watson, said that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government wouldn’t apologize for cutting “waste.”

“We make no apologies for reducing back office expenses while putting the resources where they belong on front-line safety,” Watson said.

The government declined to share details of what it had cut until it was forced to answer these questions through Canada’s Access to Information Act, which requires it to release public records upon request within 30 days to any Canadian who pays the $5 fee.

The records, received about 40 days after the request, confirm what Reuters had reported about vacant engineering and oversight positions. It also revealed these surprising details:

– All six senior positions in the Transportation of Dangerous Goods secretariat, including the manager, are vacant

– Five out of seven positions for scientists who review emergency response plans of companies transporting dangerous cargo are vacant at Transport Canada’s headquarters.

– Five out of seven positions at the headquarters are vacant for dangerous goods inspectors under chief enforcement

– Five out of 15 positions responsible for risk evaluation are vacant, including the chief of risk evaluation, and two accident analysts.

Liberal transportation critic David McGuinty said in an interview that the department appeared to be hiding information.

“Instead of coming clean and saying, we have a capacity problem right now, they won't do it,” said McGuinty in an interview. “They’ve got some explaining to do.”

You can find these records and the information that Transport Canada previously declined to release over here.

Or scroll down below to see the e-mail records from both Foreign Affairs; the charts of vacant and filled Transport Canada positions; and the e-mails from the CRA sending instructions from the office of the agency’s commissioner and chief executive officer for the deletion of internal records.

In terms of transparency, a public servant — who tipped me off about one of these stories — told me that all ministers in the Canadian government are transparent … because you can look right through them and see the prime minister’s office in the background.

Photo: Light Brigading via Flickr

CRA Delete Request by mikedesouza

DFATD underserving by mikedesouza

Dangerous Goods Chart Transport Canada by mikedesouza

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.

On August 20, 1969, two Penn Central commuter trains collided head-on near Darien, Conn.  Four people were killed and 43 were injured. The crash led the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to recommend that railroads implement new safety technology called positive train control — a system for monitoring and controlling train movements to increase safety.

The NTSB first recommended positive train control in 1970. In 2008, after another fatal train collision that killed 25 people, Congress finally passed the Rail Safety Improvement Act, which mandated positive train control be implemented by the railroad industry by the end of 2015. 

Fast-forward another six years to multiple congressional hearings in recent months, during which the railroads have informed Congress that positive train control simply won’t be implemented by the end of 2015. It’s been 44 years since the NTSB first recommended positive train control to improve rail safety in the U.S. and it is still not being used. 

Looking at the way the positive train control scenario has played out for the past 44 years offers valuable lessons on how the U.S. is now dealing with safety regulations for shipping oil by rail.

Last week, the NTSB held a two-day forum on rail safety regarding the transportation of crude oil and ethanol. One of the main topics was how to improve rail tank car safety and what to do with the DOT-111 tank cars currently being used to ship crude oil and ethanol.

Much like positive train control, the NTSB has been recommending for decades that the DOT-111 tank cars not be used for ethanol and crude oil transportation due to the high risks they pose in derailments. 

So why hasn’t anything been done? Mostly because of opposition by oil and gas industry groups, such as the American Petroleum Institute (API). The API was a constant presence at last week’s rail safety forum, just as it has been at congressional hearings on rail safety this year. A recent Reuter’s article alluded to the problem:

“Industry sources say compromise has been difficult among stakeholders with different concerns such as costs and whether an overly bulky model might limit cargoes.”

Basically, API is opposed to making changes to the rail tank cars because safety cuts into profits. Even NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman pointed to the profit motive in an interview with NPR on April 25th. Hersman said, “Absolutely. Follow the money. It all comes back to the money.” 

And the reality is that API’s members don’t have to worry about paying for accidents caused by using these unsafe DOT-111 cars. The current estimate for what it will cost to clean up and rebuild from the oil train accident in Lac-Megantic, Que., is $2.7 billion, which will be paid by Canadian taxpayers, not by oil or rail companies.

During the recent rail safety forum, the NTSB’s Hersman asked Lee Johnson of the American Petroleum Institute: “Given the rates that we heard earlier for production and the needs of your members how long do you think we are going to see DOT-111 tank cars to continue to exist in the fleet and at what rate percentage?”

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The death toll from the tragic Lac-Mégantic train derailment has risen to 15* following the recovery of more bodies from the rubble left by exploding oil tankers cars, which levelled more than 30 buildings in the centre of the small Quebec town early Saturday.

CBC News reports that "a criminal investigation is now underway as officers continue to comb through the rubble and search for some 40 people who are missing," according to Quebec provincial police Inspector Michel Forget.

Forget said "terrorism" was unlikely to be the cause of the derailment and the explosions. He didn't elaborate on the causes of the criminal probe, but said that investigators had "discovered elements" that warranted it, with "criminal negligence" being "one possible charge among many that are being considered as the investigation unfolds."

Investigators have also revealed that firefighters were called in Friday night to deal with an incident at the train in Nantes, the town where the train was parked, about 12 km from Lac-Mégantic. The train rolled downhill and exploded in Lac-Mégantic after the firefighters and an employee from the rail company left.

Nantes fire chief Patrick Lambert "said his crew received the company's blessing to leave the scene," reports CBC. Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, however, countered with the accusation that "the fire crew should have alerted the engineer who by that point had gone home to sleep for the night."

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) is also investigating the derailment, and has questioned the safety of the general purpose tanker cars used to transport flammable materials like crude oil. The TSB does not assign criminal charges, but will investigate the cause of the derailment and identify "safety deficiencies."

CBC reports that Don Ross, the TSB's lead investigator at Lac-Mégantic, also showed concern at the lack of precautionary technology on the stretch of track that might have prevented an incident like this.

"This area is not equipped with the type of signal systems that would even show to a rail traffic controller that something was moving on the territory that they hadn't authorized," Ross said at a news conference yesterday.

Another TSB investigator, Ed Belkaloul, is said to have observed that "the type of train car involved in the crash, was identified as a concern by safety officials following a 1995 train derailment in Gouin, Que., that resulted in a sulphuric acid leak into a lake and the Tawachiche River."

After the 1995 derailment, the TSB warned in their report that "the carriage of certain dangerous goods in such cars might be putting persons and the immediate environment at risk in the event of an accident."

The fallout from the tanker car explosions also includes crude oil from the train leaking into surrounding waterways via the Chaudière river. About 80 km downriver from Lac-Mégantic, the community of Saint-Georges is having to draw water from a nearby lake instead of the river, which is their usual source, because of fears "that the water is contaminated with hydrocarbons," according to a separate article from CBC.

Ross added that the TSB has had "a long record of advocating to further improvements" to the "general service" cars "because they're a very common type of tank car and take a lot of very large volumes of petroleum products, like in this case, and you can see the damage that was caused here." He said that the investigation would "establish whether everything that was done here had met the requirements."

Stephen Guilbeault, head of environmental group Equiterre, told CBC that "a wave of deregulation" has allowed companies like Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway to get away with using outdated train cars, with "the federal government…very complicit in letting companies dictate the rules of the games."

Dean Beeby of the Canadian Press wrote last year that a February 2012 briefing note to Prime Minister Stephen Harper from the clerk of the Privy Council, on the potential of rail transport of crude oil, observed "that Transport Canada officials have confirmed there are no regulatory hurdles for transporting crude by rail."

Emile Therien, former president of the Canada Safety Council, who criticized rail safety regulations in 2007, clarified in a piece for the Ottawa Citizen that "Transport Canada, with overall responsibility for railway safety, conducts audits of how a railway company maintains its safety-management systems. It does not engage in the inspection of tracks and switches." Day-to-day safety regulation is left to rail companies.

Therien did also observe that "train accidents in this country have decreased by 23 per cent" since 2007, and said that Canada's rail safety in general is "improving."   

Meanwhile, in Lac-Mégantic, 1,200 of the 2,000 evacuated residents have been let back into the town, though around 800 residents are still being kept away because of work going on in the cordoned-off "red zone." The air quality in the area has been tested and confirmed to be safe, but returning residents have been advised to "open windows and ventilate their homes."

CBC says that locals "have been quick to single out [Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway] company with complaints about its lack of visibility, its safety standards." Edward Burkhardt, head of the company hasn't visited the town yet, though he's scheduled to appear today.

Burkhardt told CBC that there's "a lot of anger" from Lac-Mégantic being directed at him, and said he hopes that he's "not going to get shot."

*As of Friday, July 12, 2013, the death toll has risen to 28.

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