I don't look upon the transparency section of this act as totally separate. Yes, it's clear it has gone toward greater secrecy and protection, but look at all the different sections, from part 1 to part 4, the whistle-blowing disclosure, contract disclosure.... I should put it the other way: it's usually exempting this stuff. Look at audits, look at any of the other areas of the act, and you'll run into subtle or not-so-subtle...like polls and when they can be released. You will run into a huge host of things that are definitely connected to transparency. You can't separate the two.
One of the easiest things would be--and you didn't need this complicated piece of legislation, which is cleverly crafted to give people more power, not more transparency--to put in schedule 1, for instance, under the Access to Information Act of crown corporations, which in part is in there, and if you didn't give them special access privileges in other clauses, you would have achieved their coverage. In that clause that says that for greater certainty, general administration would include travel and expenses, if you had said that for greater certainty, because it's before the courts now, the Prime Minister's and the ministers' records are covered, that's all you would have had to do. We would have had the interpretation cleared up.
I mean, there are things in this act that could be done properly. There are people behind the way this act was crafted who knew what they were doing, and there are people who don't deserve to be counted on in terms of making us a more compassionate and credible society with a government that acts on our behalf.