New book shows how Canada's government is too secret

Lawyer and writer Matt Malone warns Canada's access-to-information regime is failing. Photo by Spencer Colby /POSTMEDIA

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When Matt Malone looks around the world at how other governments handle transparency, he knows that Canada is falling behind.

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The lawyer’s new book “Open Governments, Secret Canada: Hiding Information Other Countries Share” explores the access-to-information regimes of many countries and what Canada can learn from them.

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“I saw that Canada was falling in all of these raking systems that measure good governance, respect for civil liberties, respect for fundamental rights, antibodies against corruption and other values like that,” said Malone, who spearheaded the development of Open by Default, a public database for government records released through access-to-information requests.

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“Looking at all of this data, and just seeing this trajectory downward, I thought, well, what is that country doing? What is that country doing? What is that country doing?”

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The question was the beginning of a journey that would take Malone across the world from Scandinavia to Singapore.

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The book, which will be published on Sept. 9, arrives at a pivotal time for Canada, as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government is looking to potentially reform the Access to Information Act in ways critics say will restrict information and hinder transparency.

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Malone said the turn towards more secrecy could backfire as “you’ll see what comes about when you don’t have these antibodies against corruption, these antibodies that sort of help with accountability and transparency.”

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In his book, Malone hoped to provide tangible reforms from other governments that Canada could implement to bring more openness in government.

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In the Netherlands, for example, the prime minister’s text messages can be accessed through access-to-information requests. Here in Canada, the Prime Minister’s Office is exempt from such requests, and is shrouded in secrecy.

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And Ireland has loosened exemptions for records that would be withheld because of cabinet confidence here in Canada. Cabinet confidence shields all official communications between ministers from the public eye. The Irish initiative made it so that cabinet confidence can only exempt those records for five years.

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“The Access to Information Act and many of our transparency and accountability frameworks are a source of frustration for a lot of users. It’s very common to hear from users of these systems that they don’t work, and so for me, the book was really an effort to flip that frustration into something positive,” he said.

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In March, the Treasury Board — the department in charge of handling the review of the act — put out a call for public feedback on several proposed policy approaches. The most frequent users of the access-to-information system say it’s in dire need of reform, but that some of the proposed changes would hinder rather than help their efforts.

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Malone and other Ottawa-based experts on Canada’s access-to-information sent an open letter to the federal government condemning those proposals.