Jack Knox
Slightly Skewed
A couple of small victories for those who cherish open government this week.
First, B.C.'s privacy commissioner ordered a company that cleans hospitals to release details of its contract with the health authority.
Then the same office ordered the province to fully disclose the details of a $300-million contract with IBM. Too bad it only took six years of kicking and screaming by the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association to force the government to release the kind of info that used to be routinely available to the people who pay the bills (that's us).
Jeezly weezly, when did government become infected with such a culture of secrecy? When did the public's right to know give way to message control and spin? When did Canada become the Soviet Union? 1984?
It brings to mind an anecdote passed on by a reporter colleague. Assigned to ask passersby about Victoria's new Emily Carr statue, she found herself talking to a deer in the headlights. "I work for the government," the woman told the reporter. "I better not say anything. I might get into trouble."
The surprising thing is that the woman's response was not surprising.
Government's say-nothing-without-permission attitude is now so pervasive that bureaucrats have a Pavlovian shock-treatment fear of the media, even when the questions have no hint of politics to them.
In the olden days, if you were a reporter with a question about, say, gravel, you would phone the government's gravel expert, who, suitably buried in a long-forgotten cubbyhole in the dank basement of a 1950s office building, would be so thrilled that someone actually wanted to talk to him about his passion that he would quiver until the rocks fell off his desk and keep blabbing about gravel until you had to fake a seizure to get off the line.
Now, instead of talking to the person with actual expertise, you get diverted to a pleasant, efficient communications professional whose job it is to ensure that you know that British Columbia is the best darn place on earth to mine/protect/invest in gravel, thanks to Comrade Brezhnev, or whoever the minister happens to be after the most recent cabinet shuffle.
Would you like to speak to the minister?
No, you really wouldn't, because you know that while the minister is a reasonably intelligent, well-intentioned person, he or she is in real life a florist from North Vancouver whose knowledge of gravel is limited to whatever it says on the briefing notes hastily assembled by the frightening young sharks whose job it is to ensure that whatever they make you swallow tastes like Kool-Aid. If the minister strays off script, he or she will wind up sharing a next-to-the-boiler-room office with the gravel guy.
At least the minister is a human. Sometimes you don't get to interview a person at all. Instead, you wait patientlyish for an e-mail with a carefully-crafted answer to a question you didn't ask ("Olympics have $14-million spin-off effect on gravel industry, minister says").
Still, the provincial government is way more open than the feds, who sound both shocked and offended to hear from someone from "the regions," as those in Ottawa refer to Saskatchewan, or Maniscotia or wherever we are. You're in one of those flat provinces that make wheat or cows or something, right? In any case, they couldn't possibly deal with your query until the story in question is long dead. Ottawa has turned obstruction into an art form.
Your local council might be no better. Secrecy and message control has spread to all levels of government. There was a nasty little spat in North Saanich this week when two newly-elected councillors balked at being asked to swear an oath that included a promise not to divulge council secrets discussed behind closed doors.
The rookies saw this as an attempt to intimidate and gag them, as the no-telling-secrets section, which carries the warning that any councillor who blabs may be held liable, was only added to the oath last week.
Here's what the oath really should say: "I promise not to discuss in secret anything that should properly be debated in public, which is pretty much everything. If caught breaking that promise, I will knock on the door of every constituent and personally apologize for betraying their trust. It's their government, not mine."
