On transparency issues, Trudeau is a lot like Harper was

This week marks Right to Know Week, celebrated annually by governments and transparency rights organizations around the world to raise awareness about an individual’s right to access government information.

Freedom of information — the ability of regular people to have access to what their governments are up to — is essential to both democracy and good governance. And while it’s fair to say that most people probably don’t get too excited about the finer details of transparency laws, it matters more than you might think — and since we just happen to be in the middle of a federal election it’s worth taking a look back on the transparency track record of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

In their 2015 platform, the Liberals included a robust suite of pro-transparency measures, pledging to make data and information “open by default,” update and expand the Access to Information Act, and ending the use of omnibus legislation.

Once in office, the Liberals got off to a solid start, publishing ministerial mandate letters for the first time in Canadian history, ending excess information request fees and promising a muchneeded review of the outdated Access to Information Act.

Unfortunately, both for Canadians and for the Liberals’ political fortunes, it has been almost straight downhill from there. The Liberals repealed a law requiring greater financial transparency from unions, and announced they would no longer enforce the First Nations Financial Transparency Act — a critical law that ensures First Nations people have the same right as all other Canadians to see the salaries and expenditures of their elected officials.

They broke their promise to extend the Access to Information Act to apply to the Prime Minister’s Office and cabinet ministers, ensuring that media, third-party watchdogs and the general public would continue to be left in the dark about the goings-on within these powerful institutions.

While in opposition, the Liberals had been highly critical of the Harper government’s use of omnibus bills, going as far as to refer to it as an “undemocratic practice” — and rightly so. These massive, creaking bills, running hundreds of pages long in dozens of different policy areas, hamper Parliament’s oversight function by making it impossible to properly study policies that should be in separate pieces of legislation.

But once in government, the Trudeau team simply picked up where the Harper team had left off. That decision would come back to bite them in a big way in the form of the SNC-Lavalin scandal. Rather than openly debating a specific bill to allow SNC-Lavalin to avoid prosecution, the government tucked the measure into the budget. Trying to hide the change didn’t look good.

There’s no getting around it: the more you look at his record in office, the more it becomes clear that despite all the positive rhetoric, Justin Trudeau has a serious transparency problem.

He failed to get clearance from the Ethics Commissioner or his family’s visit with the Aga Khan, leading to an investigation that found the prime minister had violated the Conflict of Interest Act. He has also refused to waive cabinet confidence to allow cabinet ministers to speak to the Ethics Commissioner and the RCMP with respect to the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

As Trudeau’s record shows, it’s a lot easier to promise transparency than it is to actually deliver it. For Canadians concerned about keeping government accountable, this should be food for thought as they ponder their choices in this election.