The Harper government failed to fulfill its promise to reform Access to Information (ATI) in order to make government more accountable and transparent to Canadians. Instead, the ATI system is in crisis, with requests increasingly refused or delayed, information withheld for political reasons, and Parliament denied the information it needs to function. *

In 1983, Canada was one of the first dozen nations to adopt an Access to Information Act (ATIA). Yet there was a weakness evident in its name: it was not called a freedom of information law (suggesting the citizenry’s right to information collected by their government) but an access law (giving citizens the right to a procedure). The ATIA stipulated how Canadians could apply for government information and set a 30-day time limit for a response. But it also circumscribed what information was available, excluding all cabinet documents and dozens of government agencies and Crown corporations. The ATIA established an Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) to ensure the procedures in the Act were followed, but it also declared that the commissioner could not compel the government to release information that the government wanted to keep secret—for a variety of reasons spelled out in the Act.

For the next two decades, many politicians and officials, serving both Liberal and Conservative governments, used the ATIA to hide, not provide, information. Some employed the old standby: the requested information was secret because it was subject to national security considerations. Others denied requests based on the claim that supplying the information would compromise the privacy of third parties. Excuses for delays were legion, ranging from the need to consult other departments to the inability to find data.

All these stalling tactics became too much for John Reid, the Information Commissioner from 1998 to 2006.  In 2000, Reid issued a blistering attack on the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien for attacking his office, threatening his staff, and creating huge backlogs in access requests. In subsequent reports Reid accused the government of destroying documents to prevent their release and trying to intimidate people who had legally requested information.  At the time, journalists were seeking the release of hidden files related to what would become known as “the sponsorship scandal.”  When those documents were released, and Liberal cronyism andkickbacks exposed, the Liberals paid the price in the 2006 election, losing to the Conservatives under Stephen Harper.

In the run-up to that election, the Conservative Party platform contained eight reforms of the ATI system that would to fix the most glaring deficiencies.  Harper went so far as to promise all exemptions would be subject to a “general public interest override” and to invest the Commissioner with the power to order the release of government information based on that override. 

However, the words of Information Commissioner would prove prophetic. After several years in office John Reid commented that “For the most part, officials love secrecy because it is a tool of power and control, not because the information they hold is particularly sensitive by nature."

In Harper’s first two years in office he not only failed to keep his promises but moved his government in the direction of more secrecy.  Government officials, repeatedly and unyieldingly, invoked national security to restrict the dissemination of information concerning Afghan detainees that might implicate Canadians in the commission of war crimes. The number of stalled or refused ATI requests increased, as did wait times for responses. The government ignored recommendations for reform from the House of Commons. It brushed off Robert Marleau, the Information Commissioner (Jan. 2007 - June, 2009), who put forward 12 reforms to the ATIA which he believed was badly outdated due to 26 years of "static decline." Before his early resignation from the post, Commissioner Marleau’s assessment of the Harper years was simple: "There's less information being released by government than ever before.”

Through five years of minority government (2006-2011) the Conservative track record on Access to Information can be assessed under several criteria:

1. Performance

Under the Harper government, it has been harder than ever before to pry information out of the federal democracy – information that is essential to a functioning democracy.The current Information Commissioner, Suzanne Legault, in a 2010 special report deplored a “constant decline” year over year in government obligations to meet the 30-day maximum limit for response required by law. Delays in response are the “Achilles’ heel” of ATI, Legault warned, and the public’s right to government information is “at risk of being totally obliterated.” (see table)

The Information Commissioner also warned about new trends in what causes ATI delays. One trend is the growing practice of consulting other government departments. When the Harper government was elected (2006), there were 1,330 requests that each required more than 30 days’ of consultation with one or more departments, according to Dean Beeby of the Canadian Press. That number more than doubled over the next four years with 3,064 requests delayed by more than a month for such consultations.  A second method of denying access to information is by declaring it to be a cabinet document, a practice that increased by 40% in the Harper years. “There are literally 500 ways of saying no,” according to ATI activist Ken Rubin. Rubin asserts that when it comes to sensitive issues like Afghanistan or climate change Ottawa has perfected the ability to generate black holes—nothing escapes.

Declining government performance can also be measured by how often all the information requested is released – or, conversely, how much is redacted or refused. A decade ago, in 1999-2000, the federal ATI system disclosed all the requested information 40.6 % of the time. By the time the Liberals went down to defeat to Harper’s Conservatives in 2006 that rate had already dropped to 28.4%.  But then it plummeted by almost half. In 2009-2010, in only 15% of cases did citizens get everything they requested. 

Access to Information performance

_{Sources: Infosource (Treasury Board), various years; Annual Reports of the Office of the Information Commissioner; remarks by Canadian Press reporter Dean Beeby for a Sept. 30, 2010, panel at Carleton University.}

The Harper government also put an end to a very useful ATI research tool. For decades, the government maintained a database, called CAIRS, to keep track of all information requests that had been answered. [1] If an ATI request had been returned to any individual requester the government was obliged to provide a copy of all the documents to any other citizen asking for it. And citizens could know what requests had been answered by using the CAIRS searchable database. By 2008, millions of documents were available with an addition 35,000 more coming available each year. On April 1, 2008, the government stopped updating the CAIRS database because, Prime Minister Harper explained, it was "deemed expensive.”