The Liberals are good at promising and not translating the promises of openness and transparency. Some $2 million a year is pretty pathetic, and when all it's going towards is a centralized, questionable web service for people to put in their applications with $5 and having to sign off on privacy claims, that system itself is broken with the 12 or so departments that are putting it in.
Why extend it? Why not do things more on the proactive disclosure side, let alone the commissioner side? God knows she'll need better staff and a whole new commission. The fact of the matter is, in that same budget you have $363 million given to the broken Shared Services, which can't handle even emails and data consolidation inside, and here we need, if we're going to have proactive disclosure, the technological means of better dissemination of information to the public.
I'll give you a concrete example. It's in today's Globe and Mail. For food-borne diseases, there's no national reporting system. That's a disclosure mechanism that could be of value to Canadians among many, many, many other proactive disclosure mechanisms.
Where are the millions of dollars for the real needs of disclosure? All they're doing is creating some sort of administrative system that's already broken and, I may add, gives the government a little too much insight into what every Canadian is applying for, and then they can make use of that. I'm sorry, it's the old CAIR system in disguise.