Access to crucial viral Ebola data has been denied for more than 12 years.
Nobody in Ottawa wants to guarantee records would be released in a timely fashion, let alone that historic records will be quickly declassified.
We are headed further down the golden-brick road to more privacy invasions drawn from giant personal metadata pools by both government and corporate surveillance teams.
The Ontario government’s proposed changes tear apart the foundation of the 1988 Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, but, federally, we may not be too far behind.
The Treasury Board wants to ignore the basic faults with current access, and award itself by cutting away more records and having fewer orders and users.
The mandated review of the Access to Information Act, includes proposals from the government that are ‘super regressive,’ says veteran journalist Dean Beeby. ‘It’s just bureaucrats running the show, and we’re all going to lose, because they’re not eager at all to open the system up and be transparent.’
The AI tools are designed to be used defensively to uphold secrecy positions, and to possibly contain the federal information commissioner’s efforts at ordering more timely releases.
Banning NDAs or releasing those with such agreements does not appear to be in the cards, but victims want relief.
In a world of co-pilots and chat bots, this public interest researcher feels the growing impacts of artificial intelligence.
Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard says she has had to issue an increasing number of orders to the Privy Council Office over its failure to respond to requests, and that ‘inventory keeps going up.’
The feds say the Department of National Defence treats orders from the information commissioner as a ‘priority,’ but won’t commit to a timeline.
The federal environment assessment tool was always limited, with powerful enemies fighting back well before the Carney government wanted to curtail its usage.
With Treasury Board once again handling the first stage of the ATI review, you can be sure of more delays, more exemptions proposed, and more people being excluded from using access to information.
Titles and reference numbers for memos prepared for a cabinet minister or deputy head must be proactively released by law, but are becoming ‘less obtainable’ as government entities exploit a ‘loophole,’ say transparency advocates.
We have a very tenuous and shaky situation with increasing setbacks in disclosures, and more creative avoidance, delays, and denials.
The public needs to know about incidents involving the fraudulent use of social benefits, and about how fraudsters forcefully exploit and draw others into their operations.
Internal documents give the impression Canada would gladly abandon its current support for a seabed-mining moratorium if some standards were in place.
The feds’ new national money laundering enforcement agency may not be able to confront the illegal wildlife trafficking in Canada.
Mark Carney may be looking for openings to the rigid firewalls and the access-to-information protective system his predecessors abided by—or he may just follow in their footsteps.
Revealing little is the new norm, bringing with it the same old mismanagement problems.
We need a better deal that actively puts transparency back more fully into the picture, and we can start by changing the decades-old, decrepit Access to Information Act.
It’s Prime Minister Mark Carney’s time to show whether he will make serious changes to improve government transparency, or if he’ll be the latest to continue the status quo.
The cabinet mandate letter sends a signal to expect even greater centralized control and messaging that is not conducive to the free flow of information in Ottawa.
Either Canada finally makes a real commitment to timely and more full disclosures, or we sink into a much more autocratic information system.
DND blames the loss of the memo on ‘poor information management practices’ during the COVID-19 pandemic.
