by Paul Wells
But while seeming to extend the obligation to release information in general, the Accountability Act with the other hand introduced multiple new classes of exemptions and exceptions to the laws of access, dramatically reducing the government’s obligation to release information in specific cases.
“What the government now proposes—if accepted—will reduce the amount of information available to the public, weaken the oversight role of the Information Commissioner and increase government’s ability to cover-up wrongdoing, shield itself from embarrassment and control the flow of information to Canadians,” Reid wrote in his report. “No previous government, since the Access to Information Act came into force in 1983, has put forward a more retrograde and dangerous set of proposals to change the Access to Information Act.”
Reid released his report on a Friday. The following Monday, Bill Graham, the patrician, lantern-jawed MP for the riding of Toronto Centre in the very heart of Toronto and the interim leader of the Liberal opposition during the nearly year-long interim the Liberals had already inexplicably chosen for the selection of their next leader, popped to his feet in the Commons to ask how Harper could dare do such a thing. “Will the Prime Minister now admit that his proposals are designed to accomplish the opposite of what he has promised?” Graham demanded.
Exercising the eternal prerogative of prime ministers everywhere, Harper rose to give a half-answer followed by a half-truth. “Mr. Speaker, for the first time in Canadian history, Crown corporations, independent officers of Parliament and foundations will be under Access to Information when the House passes the Federal Accountability Act,” he said. And this was true, as far as it went.
“The information commissioner has expressed some reservations. He can take those to committee. One of his reservations is that when we open CBC to Access to Information the government has protected journalistic sources. We believe those sources should be anonymous. If the Liberal Party does not think so, the Leader of the Opposition can say so.”
Graham got up and sputtered a bit. He tried his question two more times. Harper responded, twice more, with the reference to protecting journalistic sources.
Where had that reference come from? Everything Graham was quoting about retrograde and dangerous proposals was accurate. He conveyed the breadth and urgency of Reid’s concern. To defend themselves, Harper and the PMO staff had chosen a paragraph well down in Reid’s report. “With respect to the CBC,” Reid wrote, quoting the new bill, “information is excluded ‘that relates to its journalistic, creative or programming activities, other than information that relates to its general administration.’ ” So the CBC wouldn’t have to cough up any information that it asserted would relate to its journalistic activities or its creative activities or its programming activities, and the sole authority for determining the criteria would be the CBC itself. Long experience with the access law shows that the strongest government instinct, when responding to an access request, is to find a rock to hide the information under. This was a huge new rock.
And that’s just the CBC. There were nine other new exemptions and exclusions in the Accountability Act, part or all of which applied to every department of government.
Reid wrote that the exclusion for the CBC violated the principle that “exceptions to the right of access should (1) be discretionary, (2) require a demonstration that a defined injury, harm or prejudice would probably result from disclosure, and (3) be subject to a public interest override.” And whose principle was that? Reid’s, of course—but he noted that it had been “endorsed in the Conservative election platform” and “reflects the will of Parliament” as expressed in the original Access to Information Act.
But meanwhile we were being led further and further off the scent. The question from Graham, and indeed the question that arises when a government proposes sweeping changes to citizens’ right to scrutinize its actions, was whether the changes, taken as a whole, were wise and justified. The peculiar genius of Question Period as it has evolved in Ottawa is that Harper had thirty-five seconds, computer-timed and monitored by a scowling fellow in black robes sitting at the table in the middle of the Commons, to parry Graham’s question. So he sent the Liberal off on a goose chase about the CBC. Graham had thirty-five seconds to fire back. The whole charade was over before anyone watching could boil an egg. And that would be that.
Let us jump ahead, at the risk of ruining some suspense. The changes Reid warned against were passed. Three years after Reid issued his report, his successor, Robert Marleau, would say, “There’s less information being released by government than ever before.” Two years after that—this takes us to January 2011—two British academics, Robert Hazell and Ben Worthy, published a paper in the journal Government Information Quarterly analyzing the access-to-information regimes in five parliamentary democracies: Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Canada. They found New Zealand had the strongest legal and institutional commitment to access to information. Canada came last.
There is a question of principle here. The point of laws mandating public access to government information is to protect the citizen against state fiat. If the government knows more about me than I can know about the government, my safety and freedom are subject to the whims of people who hold all the cards. This is obviously a libertarian argument, and more generally it can simply be called a conservative argument.
But it is not a Conservative argument—see what I did there with the “C”?—in the sense that a Conservative prime minister who surrendered any scrap of control was increasing this minority government’s likelihood of reaching its Liberal equilibrium state. Information pried out from under the rocks of state by curious citizens and their nettlesome proxies in the press gallery is almost never good news to the incumbent government. Stephen Harper’s enthusiasm for information faded as soon as he became the incumbent.
“If you think of Harper as a conservative ideologue,” one of his MPs said over coffee one morning, “you run into no end of confusion and contradiction. But if you think of him as a Conservative partisan, most of what he does makes sense. He protects the team.”
The instinct to protect the team was behind every aspect of Harper’s constant effort to control the flow of information from election day 2006 forward. This was clear not just in the battle over Access to Information legislation but also in the government’s everyday activity. Unelected officials in the bureaucracy soon faced immediate and unprecedented restrictions on their ability to speak freely in public or with journalists. Harper’s press office became a centre, not for disseminating information, but for containing it.
“We had, over the course of several years, worked at several iterations of planning documents that eventually became the Message Event Proposal template,” a former senior Harper advisor said. “And it went along with a staff process for planning an event a few days in advance and understanding what the hell we were all doing.”
That paragraph is probably cryptic. It is worth unpacking. The idea of filling out a planning document for every single public event by any Conservative politician, or any public servant who happens to be working with Conservative politicians, crystallized a notion that is common enough in politics everywhere: if a politician does something in public, it must be to communicate a specific idea.
Aristotle taught that character is defined by habitual action. There is no such thing as a good man who happens to do unjust things, Aristotle believed, because what a man does defines him. Indeed, Aristotle’s prescription for virtue was simply to keep doing the sort of thing a virtuous man does. Modern specialists in political communication are an Aristotelian species. If a politician cuts a ribbon at a widget factory, it must be because he wants the world to know he is a supporter of widgets and the good people who make them. If he goes to a spaghetti dinner, it is because he is the kind of guy who gets along with people who eat spaghetti. Politicians are welcome to do strange things at home—read a book for pleasure, think for themselves—as long
as they do it in private and nobody finds out. A politician who does random things in public, in front of cameras and microphones, is not merely departing from the disciplined advancement of a political idea, he is undermining it.
The Harper Conservatives in 2004 had been lousy at designing events to advance their ideas, and all too good at saying things in front of cameras and microphones that produced headlines Harper didn’t want to see. Harper would go to St. John’s and hold a news conference in front of a bay window at the Hotel Newfoundland, with the astonishing St. John’s Harbour behind him, and whatever Harper was saying, it wouldn’t have a goddamned thing to do with the harbour, St. John’s or Newfoundland. And then he’d get to his hotel room, turn on his TV and discover a long-time MP like Randy White talking about how important it was to ignore the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This was a problem. He needed to become better at aligning his presence and surroundings with his message. And he needed to ensure that the evening news would less frequently feature people on his team saying the strangest things.
In 2005 the process of getting Conservatives to sing from a song sheet was accelerated by the arrival in Harper’s office of Patrick Muttart, a handsome and brilliant young government-relations consultant. Muttart had been a Reform supporter since his high-school days, but before he joined Harper’s office he had been working for Navigator, a Toronto lobbying and consulting firm. Muttart had used written forms to plan events with private-sector clients as a matter of routine, because business clients so rarely face reporters that they are not crazy enough to believe they can just wing it. Within a few months in 2005, Muttart quickly had Harper, all of his shadow-cabinet critics, and all of the party’s MPs filling out these little forms before they did any public event a reporter might attend. It was a monumental pain in the backside for all concerned, but it front-loaded the hassle: by deciding in advance what they would say, wear, carry, stand in front of, and otherwise do at next Tuesday’s event, they substantially reduced the likelihood of waking up Wednesday in a world of hurt. And when they won the 2006 elections, the Conservatives took the same planning methods into power.
It would be years before two Canadian Press reporters, Mike Blanchfield and Jim Bronskill, would get their hands on a bunch of old Message Event Proposals from the early days of the Harper government and publish their details. “An MEP template typically includes the following subtitles,” Blanchfield and Bronskill wrote. “Event, Event type, Desired headline, Key messages, Media lines, Strategic objectives, Desired soundbite, Ideal speaking backdrop, Ideal event photograph, Tone, Attire, Rollout materials, Background, and Strategic considerations.”
Of course, in power, event planning extends quite far beyond a party’s elected caucus and frequently involves large numbers of unelected bureaucrats. The former senior Harper advisor said the Message Event Proposals were initially quite popular with civil servants. “First of all, there was paper, which bureaucrats love. There are forms; a huge bureaucracy runs on forms.” Secondly, there was a measure of predictability. It is always handy to remember that Harper arrived after seventeen months of often-chaotic Paul Martin Liberal government. Meetings would run hours over schedule. Decisions would be reversed. Officials were constantly asked to implement plans Martin or his staff would abandon before the work was finished. “I think there was widespread concern across the permanent public service that the communications side of government had become awfully loose and awfully unpredictable.”
Over time, however, it became clear that the Harperites intended their message control to be pervasive. At one point there was a minor fire at the National Research Council on Sussex Drive. Employees milling outside were astonished to see a car full of departmental communications advisors arrive before fire trucks did, to guard against the threat of unauthorized media interviews.
If there was one place where the Harper–Muttart Message Event Proposal mentality took a long, long time to sink in, however, it wasn’t at the NRC, but across the street at the glowering ziggurat where the Department of Foreign Affairs housed its superbly educated and monumentally self-regarding workforce. Foreign Affairs had long considered itself the cream of the public service. The diplomatic corps. Heirs to the mantle of Lester B. Pearson, whose very name adorned the building where they worked when they weren’t swanning around the globe. It was the people in the Pearson Building and their peripatetic colleagues in dozens of foreign capitals who took the longest to realize that this Message Event Proposal business applied to them, too.
Harper and his staff were relentless. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable, I never thought it was unreasonable—I still don’t think it’s unreasonable—for someone who has a ‘Canada’ label on their business card, in speaking about whatever they’re going to get asked about, to spend at least as much time thinking about what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it as they spend actually saying it,” one of them said. “And so if people say, ‘Well, what are you going to say?’ and they say, ‘Well, we’re just going to see how it goes’—No. No, no, no, no. We didn’t run the campaign that way, we didn’t run ourselves in opposition that way, and we’re not going to run the government that way. The idea that you, somebody I’ve never met before, [are] going to go out and ‘see how it goes,’ answer any question with whatever comes into your head—No. We’re going to go through a process here. If somebody has ‘Government of Canada’ on their business card, they’d better speak for the government of Canada, and ‘government of Canada’ means government of Canada. Not, you know, somebody who says whatever the fuck comes into their head. You can’t do that. For that matter, a minister can’t. The PM didn’t do that.”
This was uncontroversial, for the most part, among officials at the Finance building on O’Connor Street. It was pretty much business as usual in the old Justice Building on Wellington, where people were well used to the notion that you had to watch what you said in public. But the toffs at Fort Pearson and the emissaries in the dip corps had a different reaction. “They were like, ‘We can’t do that.’ Why? ‘We work twenty-four hours a day, in three hundred locations around the world.’ ”
Now the former Harper advisor began to imitate for me both sides of a conversation that took place dozens of times with occasional variations, at different levels, between Foreign Affairs officials and political staff at the PMO and in ministers’ offices in the first couple of years of the Harper government. Obviously any version of such a conversation from the Harper team’s side of things will caricature the other, but it’s worth letting our Harperite continue the theatre for a minute.
“It’s going to be off the record,” the toff [says the Harperite] would say. “So it won’t be Government of Canada. It’s just my personal view.”
“Really,” the PMO type [says the Harperite] would say. “What’s the point of ‘off the record’?”
“Well, we want to be able to give people the truth, not just some spin line.”
“Well, hold on a minute. If what you’re saying is the truth, are you saying that what the minister’s saying hasn’t been truthful?”
“No, no, no, no. I’m just providing some context.”
“Okay. If it’s not the government of Canada context, what the fuck are you doing providing it?”
After enough variations on that conversation, the diplomat would relent, or seek other employment, which was just as good from the government’s point of view. About two years after Harper became prime minister, I was an invited guest at a conference of Canadian and visiting international public servants. I mentioned, in passing, that all Canadian ambassadors needed approval in writing before they could speak to local reporters in the countries where they were posted. The visitors’ jaws dropped.
While the government was facing down the people who were used to pushing information out, it also endured—often with unmistakable enthusiasm—an escalating series of battles with the people who were used to hoovering up information. In March 2006, a delegation from the pa
rliamentary press gallery met with several members of Harper’s communications staff. Sandra Buckler, who had been Harper’s communications director for a few weeks, spoke for the government. Buckler’s lead interrogator was Emmanuelle Latraverse, a television reporter for Radio-Canada.
Latraverse said she’d been receiving a number of complaints from the members. First, that Harper wasn’t going to the National Press Theatre, which would have featured simultaneous translation of his comments, for his news conferences.
“I heard from your members that they actually quite enjoy the foyer area,” Buckler said. This was the lobby outside the Commons chamber, which appeared in the background behind Harper while he spoke. “As you probably have noticed, we’re a different kind of government and we place a heavy value on communications. And we like the visuals and the ability to present the Parliament to Canadians. Which is one of the main reasons we like going in front of the House.” Buckler made it clear that she wasn’t super-interested in what reporters wanted: “We will retain the option on where we think we best can deliver our message.”
Latraverse tried another tack. Harper had instituted a system whereby a PMO press officer, Dimitri Soudas, would keep a list of reporters who would be permitted to ask questions. The reporters didn’t like this either. Stephanie Rubec, a Sun Media reporter and gallery colleague of Latraverse’s, said reporters were nervous: “they know they’re not going to get a question in because they know that Dimitri never gives them one.”