Liberals running out of time to fulfill transparency promise
Among the first promises newly elected Premier Philippe Couillard made in 2014 was to create “the most transparent government that Quebec has ever seen.”
He pledged a new era of proactive disclosure, a shift to open government and reforms to the access-to-information law.
“We need to re-establish the confidence of Quebecers in their government,” he said. “The political class is under scrutiny. ... There will be no compromising on my part on the essential question of integrity.”
Almost four years and three cabinet ministers responsible for this effort later, the Quebec Liberals are running out of time to deliver fully on this key promise.
Last week, Kathleen Weil, the minister now stickhandling the file, introduced an emergency bill of sorts that will actually clamp down on the release of sensitive government information. Weil was somewhat justified in this counterintuitive move. The declaratory legislation is meant to patch a breach in the existing law pertaining to cabinet secrecy as tobacco giants being sued by the government to recoup billions in health-care costs go to court to gain access to internal documents. After staunching this leak, Weil vowed the long-awaited bill to update Quebec’s 35-year-old access-toinformation legislation is coming soon.
Let’s certainly hope so. Quebecers have heard such promises before, from Weil’s predecessors Rita de Santis in 2016 and Jean-Marc Fournier, who kicked off a process to review procedures in 2014. But with the spring sitting of the National Assembly now underway and a fixed-date election on the horizon in October, the timeline for adopting a new law is getting rather tight.
It’s not that nothing has been done in all this time. On the contrary, there have been discussion papers and public hearings before the institutions commission.
Some piecemeal measures were put in place along the way, like a made-in- Quebec version of the so-called sunshine lists published each year by Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta, revealing the names and take-home pay of any public employee making more than $100,000. Since 2015, the Conseil executif has been disclosing the salaries of political staffers and public servants, as well as the heads of hospital networks and police commissioners.
This is an important departure already from what existed previously, when reporters (or any organization or individual) had to file an access-to-information request and then launch an appeal to the access commission (or threaten to) when they were inevitably denied basic details about public officials’ salaries. This needlessly lengthy procedure cost time, money and effort. But pre-emptively divulging data on compensation is only one small area of improvement.
The current law that governs Quebec’s access-to-information process is in desperate need of an overhaul. Dating from 1982, it was progressive for the time, but is now hopelessly out of date.
In 2012, the Centre for Law and Democracy ranked Quebec 10th among 14 Canadian jurisdictions and 58th among 102 countries’ laws that were analyzed. In 2016, Quebec’s own access-to-information commissioner, Jean Chartier, lamented that the province lags behind places like Honduras and Romania in transparency laws. The Fédération professionelle des journalistes du Québec’s expert on the matter has decried the “abuse, interference and bad faith” of public organizations and politicians alike in respecting the current system.
So what should a new Quebec freedom-of-information law look like?
Chartier himself recommended widening the scope of Quebec’s law to include any public body that receives even partial funding from government. He also complained there is too much discretion and too many grounds for refusing requests.
In several memorandums, a presentation to the National Assembly committee and followup letters, the Centre for Law and Democracy — which studies, compares and tracks transparency globally — suggested several ideas for Quebec’s legislation, with the first being to enshrine the public’s right to know.
“A strong right-to-information law should establish a clear presumption in favour of access to all information held by public bodies, subject only to limited excep- tions,” the organization states.
Any exemptions — i.e. grounds for denying a request — should be narrow, extend only to information that would be harmful to disclose and should have a “public interest override,” the group goes on to add. In other words, the reflex should be to release the information, not find ways to hold itback.
As a number of journalists complained in a Le Devoir opinion piece in 2017, the list of reasons for denying a freedomof-information request is so long and complex as to make it a nonaccess law.
So the most crucial thing the reform must accomplish is a change of attitude. Quebec has been in the grips of a culture of secrecy for too long. There is a great need for sunlight to bring transparency, scrutiny and accountability to our public bodies, institutions and officials. These, along with an informed electorate, are the cornerstones of democracy.
A piece of legislation to meet the lofty expectations set by the premier and nurtured by the public all these years will have to be carefully crafted. Time is running out.