Partisans may not believe it, but Canada’s “culture of secrecy” existed long before Stephen Harper moved into the prime minister’s office. And it’ll be around long after he moves out, unless Canadians do more than just cast their ballots in the next election.

That’s why four groups concerned about freedom of information, one of which I’m part of, are launching a campaign encouraging Canadians to take a small but vital step on social media that would raise more awareness of just how much is being hidden from us: spotlighting examples of government secrecy with the hashtag #cdnfoi.

Such secrecy has its roots in our political system, which has a tradition of strict party discipline. Because of that discipline, decisions made by the government behind closed doors – in cabinet meetings, for example – are rarely defeated in the House of Commons, making secret forums the principle arbiters of public policy.

To be sure, the Harper administration has done more than its share to cultivate a backroom state, frustrating access to government records and officials, as well as failing to fix our broken freedom of information system. But Canadian society is an especially fertile ground for the growth of policies that violate our right to know.

In part, that’s because our country doesn’t have any groups that exclusively and routinely advocate for greater freedom of information at a national level. Probably the closest we have to that is the small BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.

But, as its name implies, the association’s two staff members toil on information and privacy issues in British Columbia and the rest of Canada from a tiny office above a beauty salon and spa in Vancouver.

Meanwhile, other organizations that care about our right to know have even more multiplicitous mandates. For example, Ottawa’s DemocracyWatch stands on guard for democratic reform and corporate responsibility, as well as freedom of information. Meanwhile, Halifax’s Centre for Law and Democracy also deals with other human rights issues abroad.

By comparison, the United States has three umbrella organizations that exclusively safeguard Americans’ right to know.

They include: OpenTheGovernment.org, representing 94 groups; the National Freedom of Information Coalition, representing 30 dues-paying groups; and the Sunshine in Government Initiative, representing nine groups.

Such umbrella organizations have always been few and far between in Canada.

In the seventies, a coalition called ACCESS: a Canadian Committee for the Right to Public Information was established to lobby for greater freedom of information.

Reports from the Globe and Mail back then described the committee as having the backing of groups such as the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, the Canadian Labour Congress and the Canadian Daily Newspapers Association.

But long-time right to know researcher Ken Rubin stated in an email that ACCESS, which played a key role in the creation of Canada’s current freedom of information law, was actually “primarily a group of diverse individuals” that included academics, activists and lawyers and had some “paper” affiliations with other organizations.

Despite that key role, by the eighties the committee had folded. According to Rubin, during the same decade, a “loose coalition” came together under the auspices of the Canadian Federation of Civil Liberties and Human Rights Associations to “monitor and improve” freedom of information. That coalition also “went by the wayside” once the federation “faded away.”

Then, in January 2000, investigative reporter Robert Cribb announced the formation of Open Government Canada – a “national forum for FOI networking, education and advocacy pushing for legislative changes that grant greater access to public information.“

More than 25 groups were represented at its founding conference in March of that year. However, in an email, Cribb stated the coalition “died a regretful death.”

The reason: “It proved to be impossible to lure financial support for such an endeavour – part of the perplexing lack of concern, engagement or righteous indignation in Canada around issues such as freedom of information and the public's right to know.”

Those concerns aside, in 2011, DemocracyWatch launched the Open Government Coalition. So far, the coalition is made up of three groups – not counting DemocracyWatch and an affiliated charity. Although founder Duff Conacher stated in an email he plans to expand it this fall.

In the meantime, the New Democrats and the Liberals have proposed laws and policies that would open up government. They should be applauded for doing so. And, if the past is a predictor of the future, they may even act on some of those proposals if they win power – just as the Conservatives did.

But eventually the expediency of secrecy seems to seduce every government, regardless of its political stripe. Which means a New Democrat or Liberal administration will likely become just as tight with information as the Conservatives – albeit, perhaps, with more of a velvet glove covering that clenched, iron fist.

Don’t believe me? Well, look no further than the United States where Democrat president Barack Obama swept into office promising an “unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

Five years later, an Associated Press analysis found that in 2013 his administration “more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.”

More recently, the agency also listed “eight ways the Obama administration is blocking information.”

Meanwhile, for his part New York Times reporter James Risen has called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.”

Just as neither the right nor the left has a monopoly on the truth, neither has a monopoly on secrecy.

As a result, it’s vital for Canadians to start paying better attention to our information rights so we can better safeguard them.

That’s why the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, the Canadian Association of Journalists, DeSmog Canada and IntegrityBC, are now encouraging Canadians to tweet about threats to their right to know using the hashtag #cdnfoi.

Those threats include everything from backroom government meetings and frustrated freedom of information requests to inaccessible officials and nonexistent public records, whether they are at the federal, provincial or local level.

At present, the use of that hashtag isn’t widespread, making it more difficult for Canadians to know about such threats.

So, by just tagging stories about government secrecy with #cdnfoi, you can help your fellow citizens know about what they aren’t being allowed to know.

And you can encourage others to take up the fight by sharing these graphics promoting #cdnfoi – helping change Canada’s culture of secrecy in the process.

Image Credit: Will Brown

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.

This is a guest post by Michael Harris, writer, journalist and documentary maker.

According to the pollsters at Ipsos-Reid, about half of all Canadians don’t care if their own government is spying on them through CSEC, Canada’s national cryptologic agency.

A whopping 77 per cent of us apparently actively support such spying when it is justified by the claim that it helps prevent terrorist attacks. So the message to government is that to get buy-in from three-quarters of Canadians on gross violations of privacy, simply play the terrorist card.

(The fact that we are spying on an ally, Brazil, has sparked less public interest than Vanity Fair’s upcoming tongue-wagger on Gwyneth Paltrow.)

There are two problems with our laissez-faire attitude about the government listening in. None of us will ever be able to check the claims of the authorities when they say they acted in the interests of national security – it’s classified; and governments routinely lie about alleged security threats to get around the messy business of defending the indefensible in public.

I wonder how many people have stopped to think about the predatory menace of big governments that want to get even bigger. In the U.K., for example, look what has happened in the wake of the phone-hacking affair.

A Rupert Murdoch newspaper closed, huge fines and settlements were paid, and people went to jail. That’s what happens when you violate peoples’ privacy rights and break the law; rightly so. But politicians, who dislike the media the way our esteemed prime minister does, have used as a tool to not-so-gradually knock down free speech.

The Leveson Inquiry in the U.K. did recommend regulation of the press, but the key word was “voluntary” regulation. There is nothing voluntary about an all-party agreement amongst politicians that a government panel should have the right to decide if someone has overstepped the journalistic boundaries, or should be fired. That’s what they do in the places where there is but one name on the ballot and a dark room for dissenters.

Consider this monstrous contradiction. When journalists and news agencies were caught illegally listening in, it wasn’t enough to punish the guilty under existing law. Instead, freedom of the press itself became a target of politicians and their ongoing efforts to constrain an institution that often embarrasses them. Politicians led the charge with alacrity.

But the governments of the United States, the U.K, and Canada have been caught implementing vast domestic and international spying that makes phone-hacking look like putting your ear to the keyhole. Yet there is no talk about charging people who have violated the Constitution in the U.S., the Charter in this country, and the law in both, there is no push to hold an Inquiry – just a poll saying that an awful lot of us don’t really give a damn.

The banal routine of big government’s big lies ought to keep everyone awake at night. It has been widely reported in the U.S. and British press that the leak of diplomatic cables by Julian Assange and Wikileaks put the lives of Americans at risk and threatened national security.

Assange was universally painted as treasonous by people like then-U.S. national security adviser General Jim Jones and Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was nothing more than misguided hate-mongering disguised as patriotism. One idiot on Fox News, Bob Beckel, said that the U.S. should “illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

In Canada, Ezra Levant and Tom Flanagan agreed, Levant arguing that Assange was no different from Taliban leaders who had been targeted for assassination.

Assange had actually performed an invaluable service for democracy-loving people; telling them the documented, unspun truth about what their government was doing in their name in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In other words, doing what government is supposed to do – own up to one’s public actions in order to make accountability possible. But no one in the U.S. military was particularly anxious to talk about torturing enemy combatants, (as witnessed by former SAS officer Ben Griffin), or using white phosphorous in the raising of Fallujah, where even the British were appalled at American disregard for civilians.

As for the claim that Assange had done irreparable damage by documenting what actually happened in two wars, it was a gross distortion. Then U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates made that clear when he said the reaction from some U.S. officials was “fairly significantly overwrought,” and consequences of the leaks, “fairly modest.”

Even the chief investigator into Bradley Manning’s leak of classified documents testified that he found no evidence of a single person dying as a result of what the young soldier revealed, the Guardian reported.

And now half of the country doesn’t care if the Canadian government spies on them. One has to shake one’s head to remember that there was a time in Canada when official law-breaking was mega-news.

There was a time nearly 35 years ago when illegally opening first-class mail, stealing party membership lists, conducting unauthorized wire-taps, burning barns and conducting more than 400 break-ins led to the McDonald Commission. It pays to remember that the RCMP, which lost its Security Service over these deeds, used the Commission not to exhibit remorse for its many disgraces, but to argue that what it had done illegally ought to be made legal.

It’s time to stop jumping every time the security establishment says boo. It’s well past time to recognize that spurious national security claims have been used to either suppress information or punish those who make it available.

It is no accident that prison, embassy sanctuary, and exile have so far been the reward for three men who dared to tell what their governments are actually doing. The truth is now treasonous. The unkindest cut of all? The spooks who peer into our lives from the electronic shadows get a billion dollar palace at public expense.

For the fifty percent who don’t care what CSEC, GCHQ, or NSA are doing, ponder this: lazy democracies don’t last long. What comes next won’t really care what you think.

This article originally appeared on iPolitics.

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.