Photograph by Blair Gable; Pawel Dwulit/CP
Michel Drapeau considers himself an equal-opportunity provocateur. Since 1994, the lawyer and retired colonel has filed over 5,000 access to information requests to just about every single ministry, agency and authority within the federal government, from the Royal Mint to National Defence, for hundreds of clients—including nearly every federal political party in the country. His work helped uncover some of the more gruesome details of Canada’s mission in Somalia, which ultimately saw the disbanding of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. He is also the reason former chief of defence staff and ambassador John de Chastelain’s penchant for $285 bottles of wine is a matter of public record.
Today, Drapeau’s knack for writing access to information requests is testing the exclusion that allows the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to withhold sensitive and potentially compromising information concerning many of its core endeavours, including how its spends much of its $1-billion yearly allotment from the federal government. As well, his probe into the CBC—a “forensic examination,” as the 77-year-old calls it—is apparently fuelling a feud between the public broadcaster and Quebecor, one of the country’s largest media companies and the CBC’s chief French-language competitor.
Since the fall of 2007, Drapeau’s office has filed nearly 800 ATI requests with the CBC, asking for details on everything from its corporate governance structure and the cost of its coverage of the royal visit in 2005 to the amount that Sylvain Lafrance, head of the CBC’s French service, spent on cleaning his private boat. The CBC’s resulting disclosure—notwithstanding the full-page newspaper ads the broadcaster has taken out proclaiming its transparency—has largely been “bulls–t,” according to Drapeau. Hundreds of requests went unanswered, even unacknowledged, for two years, something Drapeau blames on the arrogance of CBC corporate management. “The CBC has not made the psychological and corporate turn,” he says. “They don’t understand that they are no longer a private-like organization that they can do as they wish without any public oversight. They have a sense of hostility toward anybody exercising their right to have access to records.”
For its part, CBC management maintains that much of the material Drapeau has requested is of commercial value to his client, the Quebecor-owned Sun Media chain, and giving it up would be tantamount to Macdonald’s sharing its secret sauce with Burger King. Yes, the CBC is a taxpayer-funded organization, they say; but it is also a broadcaster whose competitors aren’t similarly compelled to divulge sensitive journalistic, creative and programming information. The CBC’s vice-president of communications, Bill Chambers, says the delay in releasing information was due to the sheer volume of ATI requests, not corporate intransigence—a feeling seconded by Canada’s information commissioner, who has herself been at odds with the CBC recently.
“As soon as the CBC became subject to the Access to Information Act, they received many more requests than they expected, and were not staffed appropriately,” Suzanne Legault told Maclean’s. (Since 2007, the CBC has more than doubled the size of its ATI staff, to eight.)
And so a feud of sorts between the CBC and Quebecor plays out. CBC CEO Hubert Lacroix recently told a parliamentary committee that Sun Media has used its papers to “smear the public broadcaster” by publishing disparaging stories about the expenses of CBC senior management. Quebecor president Pierre Karl Péladeau, for his part, has a $700,000 defamation suit against Lafrance, who in a 2007 Le Devoir interview said Péladeau “was acting like a thug” for pulling out of the Canadian Television Fund. Péladeau’s lawsuit, CBC brass suggests, is part of Quebecor’s larger plan to sully the CBC’s reputation for its own competitive gain. Coincidentally or not, Sun Media has run dozens of stories critical of Lafrance since 2007, most of which drew on Drapeau’s ATI requests written on Sun Media’s behalf.
The outcome of this multi-front battle between public and private media corporations will dictate how much the CBC, one of the country’s most enduring and recognizable brands, must divulge to its public—and to its competitors in an increasingly cutthroat media environment.
Though he retired from the armed forces in 1993, Drapeau still trades in an army man’s lingo. “I had the staff ready to descend on the CBC come Sept. 1, 2007,” he says. “It was a target-rich environment. No one has been there before.” Sept. 1, 2007, was when, as part of its Federal Accountability Act, the Conservative government mandated that the CBC and 69 other governmental corporations and agencies be subject to the Access to Information Act. “We were told that every book was available on the Net,” he says, slapping two three-hole binders on the table in his office conference room and making an immodest gesture with his arm. “Two binders? Give me a break! This is every corporate policy that the CBC has?”
He says he ran into other problems. “For 99.9 per cent of the requests, the CBC failed to respond within 30 days, which is considered a refusal,” he says. When the CBC finally produced the documents, many were heavily redacted. The reason: the corporation is allowed to withhold “any information that relates to its journalistic, creative or programming activities.”
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