Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Your committee has invited me to give testimony about the state of access to information in Canada. Let me share my experiences with you. This is the 15th review, by the way, and I have given over 15 presentations on this topic

Information & Ethics committee  Ours is a relatively young country, but we are well known for our secrecy and corruption worldwide. Canada places low down when ranked for disclosure capabilities. Other countries, however, like New Zealand, quickly release cabinet records. I've suggested many solutions, but the

Information & Ethics committee  Just a final paragraph...?

Information & Ethics committee  It's your turn and Canadians' turn to pull back the curtains and make us truly have the right to information, as should be the case in a real democracy. Thank you very much.

Information & Ethics committee  Definitely.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely not.

Information & Ethics committee  Why don't we just start with creative avoidance of massive-scale record destruction if it's a draft? Also, oral communication is rampant. If you name it, this government and previous governments have done it.

Information & Ethics committee  Bill C-58 destroyed the access act because it hived off, as a phony proactive measure, the Prime Minister's records, ministers' records and a host of other things.

Information & Ethics committee  Pierre Poilievre and John Baird established the worst and lousiest whistle-blowing non-protection act in the world.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, no, it didn't, because it's one-sided information. Take briefing notes, the lists that are prepared.... What do you get? You go and get the briefing notes, and they're sanitized talking points. They have nothing to do with the real operations of government, which people s

Information & Ethics committee  With a few areas, I could see it, maybe for two or three years, but in most areas, no. It's just highly overrated. I went and got cabinet discussion papers when they were available, about 400 of them, and it was just like municipal council records. There was nothing in there that

Information & Ethics committee  Right now there's a myth that we have the right to information, but until we firmly establish under charter subsection 2(b)—which is freedom of expression—that we have a right to access freedom of information, we're at a loss. I don't care what the courts say about a quasi-const

Information & Ethics committee  It's a statutory provision that was even decimated further by Bill C-58. It's not part of the Constitution Act. Until we get that, we're lost. We will never.... The powers that be—the corporations, the law enforcement agencies, the bureaucrats and the politicians—will not allow t

Information & Ethics committee  Trying to get a public employee to talk to you is like trying to do something that you can't do. We have a serious problem in this country when people are intimidated by excessive rules from central agencies like Treasury Board, the Prime Minister's Office and the PCO. That intim

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, they could stop quoting every damn exemption that they can creatively use. They can get off their whatevers and answer the requests instead of waiting five or 10 years. They can do a lot of things, but they have an attitude problem about it, so they don't want to do them. A