Thank you very much for letting me speak today to the committee on the topic of transparency within the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. It is of great relevance for me for a variety of reasons, but none so much as it deeply affects my ability to undertake research in defence policy and strategy in Canada. The most effective tools I possess are the Access to Information Act system and interviews with policy-makers.
I'm going to focus my discussion on how these areas have changed over the past 20 years and affected transparency overall.
Why is this research important? The traditional and most immediate view is that this is a critical form of independent accountability and oversight on government. However, there are other benefits. Our system of governance lacks institutional knowledge. The history that has guided policy creations is frequently forgotten, even if the policies remain in place. Filling that gap can assist policy-makers craft better policies in the future.
Finally, such research can benefit the government to better communicate policies to domestic and foreign audiences. Even the most talented ministers will be limited in their opportunity to explain these contextual factors. Analysis by outside researchers can be an important communication source to help advance policy goals.
Unfortunately, undertaking public policy research has become increasingly challenging over the past two decades. I started around 2002, when transparency and oversight were heavily influenced by the fallout of the Somalia inquiry. It revealed systemic efforts by the department to obfuscate aspects of the crisis, which extended to ATI. The lack of transparency forced the department to reform how it operated for the next decade.
Over the past 20 years, ATI has become an increasingly ineffective system to obtain useful information on a timely basis. In 2002, a relatively straightforward ATI query would generally provide a good return of documents. A set of ATIs I used to examine the 1996 intervention in Zaire provided over 2,000 documents with a very high level of complexity, including a large number of foreign confidences, advice and sensitive information. The original request took about a year to be released and provided an in-depth view of what occurred during that operation. This would be unheard of today.
The number of pages has decreased year on year, and officials frequently employ highly restricted interpretations in an effort to suppress the disclosure of some documents, or claim that no such records have been found. In other cases, requesters are advised that the scope of their request is too broad and are forced to truncate their query. Finally, requests frequently take years to be fulfilled, severely diminishing ATI's value as a research tool.
Not all of the reasons for this situation are necessarily intentional. The ATI system today relies heavily on departmental staff to assess documentation for release, the same staff who are already overburdened with their day-to-day work. It is far from an ideal approach to handling ATI requests.
Concurrent to the ATI system's enfeeblement, there's been a consistent effort to curtail the ability of officials to discuss policies with interested parties. In the years after the Somalia inquiry, DND employed a fairly liberalized communication policy, and access to officials was fairly good. One of the most helpful aspects was that departments made available subject matter experts to discuss specific areas.
However, in 2005, the policy changed dramatically, in part due to the belief that the war in Afghanistan required message discipline, and a preference by the Harper government to centralize communication strategies. Access to information was curtailed and replaced by superficial media response lines from public affairs representatives.
Furthermore, the ability to maintain working relationships with officials has become increasingly strained. One of the most serious ruptures occurred after 2015, when Vice-Admiral Mark Norman was charged with a breach of trust and members of the future fighter capability project were forced to sign a gag order. These events had a serious chilling effect on the bureaucracy, as individuals felt fear towards the potential consequences of talking outside of government. While we have recently witnessed a greater engagement by defence officials in the past year, there remains a significant reluctance to speak with candour on issues.
Where are we today? Overall, I believe that the poor state of transparency in defence has largely been counterproductive for the government. Public understanding of the military is at an all-time low and contributes to the lack of support. This is in part due to the lack of open information available and the adversarial relationship that has developed between government and outside bodies over access to information.
Unfortunately, I don't have an easy solution to this problem. There is a deep-seated view that the current approach is the only way to successfully manage public relations. Seeing past the immediate situation to a radically different future is a tough sell for any government. I fear that it will require another Somalia-scale scandal to impel a government to shift its behaviour, which will benefit no party or the country as a whole.
Thank you.