Five years on, carbon-tax query gathers dust
A curious thing happened five years ago: The federal government imposed a carbon tax on April 1, 2019. And Postmedia sent an access-to-information request related to it that has received no response to this day.
This week marks the fifth birthday of the Postmedia information request that Environment Canada keeps refusing to answer.
Maybe the odd events of that week are nothing, just a coincidence. But with no information available, who can tell?
Here's the coincidence: On April 2, 2019, one day after the new carbon tax began, Environment and Climate Change Canada announced research showing that Canada will suffer twice as much from climate change as most other countries. This was actually old news, repackaged: It's been known since the 1980s that Arctic countries are warming twice as much as many other countries, and we're a country with a huge Arctic landmass. So why announce this as news?
So, we wondered: Is the climate study being published in order to help justify the tax increase? Is federal science being used in this case to make a new tax appear necessary?
We asked for some emails on the topic, using the formal access-to-information system, then paid our five bucks and waited. The rules for federal access requests say that the feds owe an answer to whoever asks within 30 days unless there are complications, which can add several months. Right away, complications popped up. Big ones. ECCC wanted another 180 days to reply.
We waited. There are no consequences when the federal government fails to obey its own rules: They miss a deadline by five years, and everyone just goes home. (Try that with your income taxes.)
The specific request we made was for emails within ECCC's communications department over a onemonth period leading up to the announcement of the new climate study. It has now taken 60 months to review one month of emails among a tiny group of people on a
single subject.
And it's a pattern. A 2019 survey by ECCC showed the department simply walked away from more than 600 access requests from the public, media and businesses in the previous 10 years.
Bizarrely, a news release has now become the object of secrecy, and the feds say working from home is one reason they can't do their work to release it. The analyst was working at home and explained that the paper documents were still at the office. There were two boxes of records, and he can't look through two boxes so quickly.
Both the minister's office and the department were quick to tell us in 2019, via two brief emails, that the new tax and the climate research report were in no way related. But they dismissed our request for specific information and offered no detail on the central question: Why did these two events — the tax, and the public release of a study — coincide in the first place?
It's a problem that is trending in modern journalism. You can't talk to government people. They won't speak. They just email, and a reporter can't follow up with a question like: What do you mean? Or, why is that? Or anything else.
So maybe it's all just coincidence, but if people can't handle simple access-to-information requests, how can we know?
They're still sitting on our five bucks.