My fight for Freedom of Infomation

Canada’s lamentable record on Freedom of Information was made embarrassingly clear last week with a report from two British academics that looked at the effectiveness of FOI laws in five leading democratic countries. The story: We stand last, after Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK in ensuring the right of access to government documents.

Here’s a quote:

Canada comes last as it has continually suffered from a combination of low use, low political support and a weak Information Commissioner since its inception.”

I can speak from personal knowledge as to the silliness that ties up records that should long ago have been made public.

In 2007, I wrote an article for The Beaver (now Canada’s History) about Technocracy, an organization that advocated radical (but entirely non-violent and peaceful) social change. Their idea was to put the engineers and scientists in charge, replacing politicians and businessmen. The brain behind the movement was Howard Scott, a New York based engineer.

In The Last Uptopians, I reported that the Technocracy movement had gained considerable momentum across Canada in the Hungry Thirties. When World War II broke out, Technocrats advocated conscription of all our resources – financial as well as human. Naturally, this didn’t sit too well with the Mackenzie King government. The organization was banned from 1940 to 1943 on the grounds that one of its objectives was to “overthrow the government and the constitution of this country by force.” No evidence of any such intention was ever unearthed. Several other groups were outlawed at the same time, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Communist Party.

When I applied to Library and Archives Canada for the file on the government’s case, portions of several documents were withheld. The reason given, more than sixty years after the fact, was that their release could be “injurious to the conduct of international affairs … or the detection of hostile activities.”

I appealed the decision. Not hearing anything, I applied again recently and found out that the Post Office had failed to forward a letter sent to me in March, 2009.

Now that I finally have the letter, I learn that the Office of the Information Commission is backing LAC in its refusal to release “certain documents.” A letter from OIC director of compliance Sandra George, says:

…we are satisfied that it is information the disclosure of which could reasonably be expected to be injurious to the defence of Canada and/or the detection, prevention or suppression of subversive or hostile activities.”

In addition, some of the information apparently pertains to people who have not been dead for at least twenty years. The Privacy Act prohibits such disclosure. On that score, I cannot imagine there being more than one or two persons who were active in the 1940s who would not have been deceased by 1990. And has LAC checked that out?

I conclude from all this that telling anything about those dangerous Technocrats running around seventy years ago (let’s see, they’d have to be over ninety years of age now, at a minimum) might render CSIS or the RCMP incapable of any longer protecting us from subversives and hostiles. What nonsense!

Perhaps the real reason for the lack of disclosure is that the missing documents put the lie to the government’s case for banning Technocracy.

But without vigorous defence of  Freedom of Information in Canada, we’ll never know.