Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW

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"We could, in addition to the previous line, perhaps add a line such as…"

by Paul Wells on Monday, July 27, 2009 2:07pm - 20 Comments

Colleague Petrou asked the Department of Foreign Affairs for information. This set squadrons of bureaucrats into many rounds of frantic consultation about how to give him the smallest possible amount of information. Read all about it here. It would be hilarious if it weren’t perfectly appalling.

I’ll note only that this obsession with saying as little as possible and mattering as little as possible did not begin with the Harper government, though it has been refined to self-satirizing perfection over the past three years. In 2002 I attended a summit of La Francophonie in Beirut at which the only usable information Canadian reporters received came, not from Jean Chrétien’s entourage, but from reading the Beirut newspapers and eavesdropping on the French government’s briefings of its own reporters. Every reporter who uses the Access to Information Act has no end of horror stories of duplicitous foot-dragging.

But it has all been getting worse. And Robert Marleau, the departing Information Commissioner, let it go on for years before announcing his snap retirement. Much of the coverage of that decision was given over to wondering why Marleau was leaving so early. I wonder, since he was bound to do so little to fight the attitudes Petrou chronicles, why he bothered hanging around so long.

Tags: michael petrou, Obfuscation, Robert Marleau, Stephen Harper

More by Paul Wells

http://intensedebate.com/people/jolyon jolyon

What is it with bureaucrats and their desire to keep every freakin' thing secret. Do our bureaucrats go too far to make themselves feel more important, like Canada actually has secrets others may be interested in. I wonder if paranoia is a highly valued trait during the interview process or does it just develop over time.
http://intensedebate.com/people/Ed_Sweeney Ed_Sweeney

Wells, you're right. I dug up this tidbit:

Dateline: Athens, Greece 511 BC

08:06 GMT – Senatorial scribe answers inquiry regarding tax increase proposition
08:11 GMT – Angry mob shouts down Senator 's speech at the agora
08:16 GMT – Senatorial scribe shackled, shipped to Rome as lion fodder.
08:17 GMT – group of Senatorial scribes seen huddling in whisper
Mulletaur

Meanwhile, the government of the United States of America, a hyperpower, regularly declassifies huge swathes of material regarding national security, releasing it into the public domain through the National Security Archive.

By the way, has the government named a replacement for Marleau yet ? Or is that also a state secret vital to the national interests of Canada. Huh.
http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

Seems to me the Access to Information Act should be scrapped. What's important is what the Minister says. The duplicitous foot-dragging in this case is peanuts compared to the contrast between what MacKay said and what Petrou unearthed about the witnesses. The Minister is responsible to the public; the officials are only responsible to the Minister. Besides being a huge waste of everybody's time, the Access to Information Act obscures that vital difference. But I suppose that raises the point of what ministerial responsibility means when neither the Cabinet, nor the Opposition, nor the public takes Question Period seriously anymore. Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically we've reached the point where the public passes judgment at election time on the Government's conduct over several years, but in the meantime the only residue of shame in our parliamentary system — i.e. the only motive not to just ignore Parliament and/or lie — is the ceaseless windbagging of QP and the scrums. In other words, the only visible effect of ministerial responsibility is that the Government still feels obliged to talk to anybody, albeit meaninglessly. I wonder how long that will last. Why does the PM even bother showing up for QP anymore? Why does anybody?

Mulletaur

How may civic virtue be restored ?

http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

I don't really know, Mulletaur, which is why I spend whole days looking at a portrait of Laurier and quietly weeping. Why were Ministers formerly more inclined to answer questions truthfully? Is it the decline in gentlemanliness? Perhaps our Westminster system can't work if most MP's set little value on their own dignity (or have little of it to value in the first place). In which case we are screwed.

Mulletaur

I think we have to start with people rather than politicians. We need to get people to take ownership of the political process and start demanding results, including openness in government. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the problem is not with political elites nor is it with the electoral system (as much as proponents of proportional try to convince us of it) – the problem is us. When our politics becomes lame and mediocre, we should get angry about it and demand better. When government ministers lie because they can hide behind their reticent bureaucrats, we should demand transparency and truth and force the facts out into the open. But we Canadians don't, we're sheep.

http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

I agree.

What about having some provision to compel employers to retain, if not pay, people who run for office, as (I think) is the case with our reservists when they're deployed overseas? A lot of people would be more involved if they stood a snowball's chance in hell of ever being nominated; but as it is few people apart from professional or semi-professional politicos can afford to take two months off to campaign, much less four years off to sit as an MP. So we end up with this druidical caste of MP's and potential MP's which, like all druidical castes, has a peculiar set of values of its own, including an addiction to grandstanding.
Mulletaur

That is certainly one issue but probably not the one that will tip the balance in favour of better politicians. If we as electors are more demanding, they will respond. Or we'll vote them out. The party system when it works is pretty good at ensuring at least some standards are met. More democracy at the party level, particularly regarding the selection of candidates, would probably help with this. I would be in favour of standardized intelligence, aptitude and general knowledge tests for candidates, but I don't think that's happening any time soon. Oh, and I am enchanted with the idea of deselection as they have in the United Kingdom. The Reform Party used to be in favour of this.
http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

"If we as electors are more demanding, they will respond. Or we'll vote them out."

That's the bottom line, I guess. Perhaps it's that we've had such a long run of prosperity — since the early 1990's, essentially, if not since the mid 1970's — and thus the electorate has not had reason to care about politics for a long while. If something serious came along — and I thought this recession would be it, but apparently not, or not yet — then they might become more generally interested and pay attention to minor but important stories like this one. Orwell has a piece from about 1941 in which he notes that all English newspapers, even the tabloids, had become far more grown-up because of the war, presumably as the reading public started to actually care about events.
Mulletaur

My theory is that politics just doesn't matter to people as much in democratic countries after the end of the Cold War. I will get around to writing a book about it some day …

Lord Kitchener's Own

Seems to me the Access to Information Act should be scrapped. What's important is what the Minister says… the contrast between what MacKay said and what Petrou unearthed about the witnesses.

Aren't you contradicting yourself at least a little here? I mean, true, in this case Petrou was able to dig up a lot about the witnesses independent of the Access to Information Act to uncover how disingenuous the Minister was being, but don't we find out that the government is lying to our faces more often than not BECAUSE of the Access to Information Act? And, in this case, hasn't the Act provided us with valuable insight into the convoluted measures officials will go to to keep the public in the dark?

I also disagree with this: "The Minister is responsible to the public; the officials are only responsible to the Minister". Good God I hope not!!! The officials are responsible to us too. That's why we call them public servants. I get that we can't directly fire them (exactly) but the boss of my boss is my boss, if that makes sense. The Minister is their boss, we're the Minister's boss. You'd better believe they're responsible to us! (I mean, we'd ALL better believe it, 'cause if civil servants weren't responsible to us, we'd never have found out HALF of the stuff that Ministers of the Crown have tried to pull in the past… and as it is I suspect we only know the tip of the iceberg!)

Mulletaur

You're right, Access to Information at least exposed part of the story. But without any organization putting constant pressure on the government to provide access to information combined with public interest in the story, the government and the bureaucracy can continue to stonewall any attempts to get at the truth.
http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

@LKO:

in this case Petrou was able to dig up a lot about the witnesses independent of the Access to Information Act to uncover how disingenuous the Minister was being

He had already shown that, however, by his zealous tracking down of the witnesses. That's the real story here; the obfuscation is a side-story that merely confirms it.

hasn't the Act provided us with valuable insight into the convoluted measures officials will go to to keep the public in the dark?

Well, sure, but wasn't that already apparent from the fact that the Minister is not answering questions about this? The miracle to my mind is that the officials are bothering to obfuscate. I'm guessing they must have had instructions to do so; would you have unelected officials answering questions from the press when the Minister, their boss, the one who is accountable to the public through Parliament, refuses to do so?

The officials are responsible to us too.

They are responsible to the public through the Minister. If they were directly responsible (i.e. accountable) to the public, they bond between minister and official would be greatly weakened, with two dire effects: the Government could disown the actions of its own officials, i.e. pick and choose what it was responsible for and what it wasn't responsible for, and officials would continuously upstage the Cabinet, i.e. we'd actually be governed by unelected officials. This is what you're getting at, I think, when you say "the boss of my boss is my boss": this is true, in that there's a chain of responsibility, but you wouldn't break the chain of command in your organisation, would you? Nor would a Board of Directors tolerate a CEO who disowned every problem by saying, "Oh, so-and-so in the Widget Department screwed that up, nothing to do with me."

Lord Kitchener's Own

would you have unelected officials answering questions from the press when the Minister, their boss, the one who is accountable to the public through Parliament, refuses to do so?

Well, yes, in the limited scope of when the Minister is not so much refusing to answer as lying to the public (though, I suppose one could argue that these days that's hardly a "limited" scope). I certainly agree that a Minister is ultimately responsible for the actions of officials and not the other way around, and officials can't go breaking the "chain of command" willy nilly, but still. Even in the military you're allowed to break the chain of command if your CO, say, orders you to do something that's illegal. I'm not suggesting I know precisely where the line is, but ultimately I do think public officials are accountable to something higher than just "the Minister". Thy're accountable to US. And at some point, their duty to the public outweighs their duty to the Minister. I also think that a bureaucrat saying "the Minister lied to the public" is a totally different think than a Minister saying "Oh, that wasn't me, that was a bureaucrat in my department". The employee can break the chain of command and rat out the CEO to the Board of Directors, but that's a one-way street that doesn't apply the other way around.

http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

I think there is a strong distinction to be made between shady but legal activity (like figuring out how to stonewall Mr. Petrou) and illegal activity (and it is not illegal for a minister to lie to the public). I just don't think officials should be the judge of which legal orders they obey, any more than soldiers are. If the word came down from the Minister that Mr. Petrou is to be stonewalled, a-stonewallin' they will go (though email is perhaps not the ideal medium for planning how to do that).

The employee can break the chain of command and rat out the CEO to the Board of Directors

But it would have to be something pretty huge, I think: just as one has a duty to the truth and the law, one also has a duty to one's duty.

Khai

I worked for a small federal gov agency for several years. Although I have mostly good things to say about the work that public servants do, I found it frustrating to be on the side that wanted to GIVE information when it was requested of me, only to have various levels of supervisors prevent me from doing so. In the case of my office, it wasn't anything sinister. There was no agenda to keep information out. it was more about managers wanting to check and double-check whether or not it was in our purview to give such information, whether it was our jurisdiction, etc. They didn't want to get in trouble! Simple as that. So they consult with Ottawa, who consults with god-knows-who, and because we're Vancouver and not the Center of the Universe (Ottawa), responding to us was not a priority. Personally, I found that when in doubt, just GIVE the information and don't consult with managers. Because somewhere along the line, someone was afraid of getting in trouble. Especially when dealing with the media.
http://intensedebate.com/people/janicemaerose janicemaerose

Where in the heck are our opposition parties in this whole fiasco? That's what gets me. Why aren't they publicizing stuff like this and demanding action? The Harper government is getting away with so much of this kind of obfuscating while the Liberals seem to have no clue, let alone the NDP.

Oyy – it's frustrating!
bmac

ATIPS would be processed much faster if it weren't for the Ken Rubins of the world who file thousands of requests a year hoping to find something "gotcha-worthy" and then sell it to the highest bidder.

Also keep in mind that every media call response must be approved by a politico, so if the bureaus are being overly circumspect of their own responses, it's likely because they know they'll be wasting their time trying to say anything of substance – i.e. it will be shut down by the Min's office.

Finally, the major problem in govt is DMs with no cahonnes – they won't stand up to the 23 year old weasels who serve as comms directors and policy advisors in the various ministers' offices.
Sadly, when a DM does push back, he/she is shown the door – Louis Ranger anyone?
Mulletaur

Looks like our diplomats are getting a little sick and tired of being jerked around by wet behind the ears ministerial staffers who have no idea of the implications of what they are doing.