Information & Ethics Committee on April 19th, 2016

[Sean Holman]

To be clear, the Canadian Association of Journalists and I are not recommending entirely doing away with exemptions and exclusions. I think what the Canadian Taxpayers Federation just mentioned about, for example, national security issues, privacy issues, etc.... These are legitimate areas in which there may be some reason that we need to keep the information secret.

Going to the point you just mentioned, however, and the examples you brought out—trade negotiations, for example—once a trade negotiation is concluded, would it not be reasonable for the public to understand the grounds under which the deal was made? That seems to me to be a reasonable thing that the public should have access to.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the United States once wrote that “secrecy is for losers”. By that, I would say he means that secrecy is for those people who cannot rightly explain the decisions and actions they are taking to the public. There should be no reason for secrecy in the examples you mentioned, if government is able to actually defend making the decision it made, if it made a good decision.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Mr. Ring or Mr. Murray, do you have any examples?

[Sean Murray]

Yes, I have a couple of examples. First of all, concerning the examples that you reference, I think that as long as you have harms-based exceptions incorporated into your statute so that you are not necessarily excluding entire classes of documents but are saying, if the disclosure of certain information could reasonably be expected to lead to well-defined harms, then I think you can ensure that your statute is designed to protect against those harms occurring, if the disclosure happens. I think there is a way to deal with the concerns you're referencing.

I would address one example you mentioned, procurement. I think in all of the access to information legislation across Canada, if someone requests, for example, a copy of a contract to provide goods or services—a contract between a private sector entity and the government or a public body—there is a process whereby notification must be given to a third party, and the government can either refuse access or can decide to give access, but the third party can then object and attempt to refuse access.

What we're trying to pursue in this jurisdiction is something called open contracting. I don't know whether you've heard much about it yet in your process, but open contracting basically is a concept whereby, if an entity has a contract to provide goods or services with a public body, by and large that information should be available to the public. Sometimes there may be proprietary information that is associated with it or that had been provided along with it, and that can be withheld. But what the government is paying to a private sector contractor and what they're purchasing in terms of goods and services for that money can be made proactively available.

That's one way that I think we can in fact avoid some of the processes and the delays that are associated with access to information, by designing your process in that way, for proactive disclosure.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Thank you very much. That's basically the only question I had.

We only have about five minutes left, but in that time, seeing that we don't have a whole lot of time to re-engage in a conversation, I'll take this opportunity to thank you all very much for making yourselves available to the committee today.

I want to thank my colleagues at the committee table. This was an excellent meeting.

I remind my committee colleagues that we will be meeting again on Thursday, as we've changed our schedule now. We will be resuming on this particular topic, on this legislation. I'm just working with the clerk now to secure the witnesses whom we have, but we will have a meeting. We have enough witnesses already, I think, going forward, so we'll continue on with our study. Please check your mailboxes for an update on what location we'll be at and who the witnesses will be.

With that, I would like to adjourn the meeting and thank everyone for their patience with the chair today.