Digging for dirt on the CBC

It’s a sensible enough exclusion that allows the CBC to protect its journalistic sources and commercial interests. Yet Drapeau believes the corporation has used it as an excuse to avoid disclosing potentially embarrassing information. “I don’t have a problem with the exemption. I have a problem with the way it was applied,” he says. “They will use it to the nth degree in order to not release any information.” The CBC, naturally, takes a different view. “If you ask us for something that is entirely to do with our programming, you are going to get a redacted document,” retorts the CBC’s Chambers. And indeed, Drapeau’s office asked for financial audits of the CBC’s Olympic coverage and documents relating to the cost of its Hockey Night In Canada theme contest, among other similar requests.

Yet the broader question is that for now the CBC decides what constitutes its own journalistic, creative or programming activities, an idea with which both Drapeau’s office and federal Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault have taken issue. It’s the subject of an ongoing court action between the CBC and Legault’s office. The CBC challenged the commissioner in court, saying only a judge—and not Legault—could review its sensitive documents. In September, a federal court ruled against the CBC, which promptly appealed the decision.

Precedent would appear to be on the commissioner’s side: in the case of the BBC, governed by similar disclosure laws, the country’s information commissioner (and not the BBC) decides what information can be withheld from public view. And Legault points out that Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., which has a similar ATI exclusion, regularly submits its sensitive documents to her office for review.

The corporation has since responded to most of the requests, and posted much of the (sometimes heavily redacted) material on its website, including financial audits, senior management expenses and annual reports—though not before David Statham, a lawyer in Drapeau’s firm, sued the corporation. (Both the Federal Court and the Court of Appeals quashed Statham’s complaints, saying that by the time the case was heard, the CBC had responded to all of Drapeau’s office’s ATI requests, however late.)

Drapeau says it’s his own interest in the inner workings of the CBC that’s behind their investigation. “It was my initiative,” he says, adding that Sun Media had no input into the direction of the investigation. Still, Sun Media has certainly capitalized on Drapeau’s findings—particularly those involving La­france, head of Quebecor’s biggest competitor in its home province. Between Jan. 1, 2007, and Aug. 4, 2010, the chain’s English-language papers, including the Toronto and Calgary Sun, published 10 stories about Lafrance’s expenses; in the same period, they published only three about Richard Stursberg, then La­france’s English-language equivalent. The gap was wider in Quebec: the Quebecor-owned Journal de Montréal ran 12 stories critiquing Lafrance’s expenses during the same time period, and only one on Stursberg.

“At Quebecor, we encourage all our journalists to make every effort to report on how the government spends its tax dollars,” says Quebecor corporate vice-president Serge Sasseville, noting that Quebecor journalists regularly investigate other facets of government as well. “It happens that Radio-Canada is one of the most important Crown corporations in the country, and receives the biggest taxpayer subsidy. It is absolutely not a campaign against Sylvain Lafrance.”

Meanwhile, the court battle between Péladeau and Lafrance, stemming from the “thug” remark, plods along. Lafrance made the comment in early 2007, soon after Quebecor-owned cable company Videotron announced it would withhold its contributions to the Canadian Television Fund, in protest of how the fund allocated money. “I was dismayed” after hearing Lafrance’s remark, Péladeau said. “It was an attack on my reputation. It perturbed me. There was an intention to insult me publicly.”

The trial has taken on elements of the absurd. La­france’s lawyer brought in an expert to distinguish the difference between calling someone a thug and saying that they are acting like a thug. (“It’s not an identity, it’s an analogy,” testified linguist Jean-Claude Corbeil.) Two weeks ago, Péladeau’s lawyers asked for Judge Claude Larouche to be removed from the case, claiming bias.

The CBC’s Chambers has difficulty believing the ATI requests, the hounding of Lafrance and Péladeau’s defamation suit are a coincidence. “It’s impossible not to recognize that there’s a court case going on in which Quebecor is suing Lafrance and the CBC,” he says. “Is that linked? I can’t speculate. But there’s lots of circumstances that raise questions. There was a spike in the number of [access] requests to the CBC in the fall. We got a hundred in a couple of weeks. Is it a corresponding spike? Who knows. Maybe it’s just a nice person in British Columbia who all of a sudden took an interest in our internal workings.”