I think my experience reveals two things. First of all, anybody in the public service, at any level, who creates documents and reviews them in the course of their work thinks their work is important and that, because it's important, it must be secret. Amongst people who create and hold records, I think there's a tendency to overstate the import of those documents to be released.
What I'm saying is that subsection 15(1), which Professor Attaran was talking about, is a section of the Access to Information Act that's very broad. It allows the government basically to withhold any information that would be, if it were disclosed, “injurious to the conduct of international affairs” or the preservation of national security. When you really think about that, it means that anything withheld under subsection 15(1) has to be virtually a state secret. Otherwise, you are overstating the sensitivity of the information. I think that's the first thing.
The second thing is much more issue specific, if I'm hearing your question correctly. My sources within the government—and I'm speaking as a journalist—say there is a chill going through major departments right now on issues surrounding torture, detainees, and Afghanistan. There is a very obvious reluctance for anybody to talk about it. In some departments, my sources tell me, special teams have been formed in order to deal with certain requests that relate to detainees, and these requests are specially treated.
So those are two things that I think are at work. When you talk about stonewalling, I'm not sure it's a cold-blooded case of their saying they're going to do this. I think it's more that part of it is a human tendency to overstate the importance of the documents that somebody works on, and then, when somebody else asks for them, to say that this second person can't have them because the defence of Canada or our international reputation rides on the e-mails sent to colleagues by the first person.
I looked very quickly at some of the copies of this report that were redacted and that we're talking about. I was astounded at the amount of white space that was actually left. I've asked about the Darfur region, as a totally different topic, and the documents that I get back are page after page of blank documents. For some documents, there's a whole page that just says they're withheld in their entirety under subsection 15(1). You can't even read these documents. They're about Darfur, and it's hard to know that they are e-mails between people working.
I don't think it's specific to Afghanistan, but as I say, I think Afghanistan has caused a chill to go through departments at the working level because of the notoriety it has received.