On the spring night in 2014 when Quebec voters chose him to lead their province, Philippe Couillard promised “the most transparent government in Quebec’s history.”
Last week, Mr. Couillard’s government exposed that promise for what it was: a bald-faced lie. It quietly passed a bill on Mar. 20, just 33 days after it was introduced, that cynically undercuts Quebec’s access-to-information legislation.
The law wasn’t a shining beacon of transparency to begin with, but henceforth all policy analysis and advice submitted to cabinet by ministries and agencies will be blanketed by the same 25-year blackout that applies to cabinet secrets and political discussions.
Bureaucratic evaluations of some future pharmacare reform, or internal report cards on an eventual plan to improve elementary schools? We’d love to show you but, well, confidentiality, you see.
Former magazine editor Jean Paré, who chaired the commission that helped set up Quebec’s first access law, put it succinctly in an interview: “We’ve gone back 40 years.”
He’s right. Alarmingly, though, Quebec’s retrograde approach is not unique: Too many Canadian governments take the same cavalier approach to public records and voters’ access to them.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected in part on a promise of greater transparency, but the Senate is studying a government bill that Canada’s Information Commissioner describes as “outdated” and “a shield against transparency.”
The widening disconnect between word and deed is bad news not just for effective governance but ultimately for democracy. It’s impossible to hold a government to account without understanding the choices it makes and seeing the information that underpins those choices.
Worse still, as Facebook and Google trade in the private data they collect from Canadians – and politicians do nothing but happily use that data to woo voters – those same politicians invent reasons to withhold more and more government information from the public.
And all the while they keep promising the next great reform in government transparency is just around the corner. It’s getting to be a bad joke.