Releasing the report would be simple — if the political will existed.
There is no great mystery. When it’s all said and done, it’s about political will
I don’t understand all the head-scratching and brow-furrowing at Queen’s Park about, as Premier Kathleen Wynne puts it, “how to make the information in the SIU report public.”
The provincial government releases reports all the time, they are experts at it by now.
They have millions of dollars of report-releasing infrastructure in place: websites, communications staff with expansive email lists and social media accounts, even a publications department that produces print books people can order.
There is no great mystery about how the government releases a report.
If they want to release the report into the investigation of the police shooting of Andrew Loku, as the premier and her Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur now seem to agree they want to do in response to an ongoing Star campaign for transparency, they can just release the report.
I suppose the true question they’re raising is how much of it they release.
The simple answer to that second question — the one I tend to think is the right answer — is “all of it.” But I understand there is another opinion worth considering.
Premier Wynne and Meilleur have told the Star that they’re concerned about protecting the privacy of those named in the report — including the police officer subject to investigation and the witnesses who spoke to investigators.
The information and privacy commissioner has told the Star that there may well be no obligation to protect their privacy, but even so many would argue that there are legitimate reasons to keep their identities secret. That’s a valid debate to have.
But while we’re having that debate, the immediate solution remains simple. You censor the names and identifying information in the report, and release the rest of it. The government does this all the time in response to information requests, blacking out details that are governed by privacy legislation on documents it releases. Judging by some of the documents the Star has been sent, government staff have a ready supply of Sharpies on hand and know how to use them. This flair for censorship is a frustration to us — the Star’s position, and my own, is not that the government should censor information, quite the opposite.
But I think that if there is reason to have a debate about censoring particular specific pieces of information, that shouldn’t prevent the rest of it from being released immediately.
Which brings us to the other key question: Wynne told my colleague Robert Benzie on Thursday the Loku report will be released; that the question is not if, but when. I’d suggest the right time to do it is now. If they feel the need to censor identities while we debate the competing public interests on that privacy issue, fine: Take a black magic marker, spend an hour blacking out the names, then fire up the scanner and put the report online.
Meilleur and Wynne have both made hemming and hawing noises about the lack of precedent and about the precedent they’ll set — about how they’ve never released a Special Investigations Unit report before, and they want a process in place for future reports. But there’s nothing to worry about here: the reasons to release the Loku report, so that the public can see the grounds on which important decisions are being made, apply to every case. If you’ve decided, as they apparently have, that such reports should be released, then they all should be released. Get on with it.
The idea that information about why a police officer shot and killed someone should be kept secret was a significant mistake — one that unnecessarily undermines trust in police forces and makes a joke of the idea of public accountability for officers. When you realize you’ve been making a self-destructive mistake, the thing to do is to stop making it. The time to stop is immediately.
To release the information in the SIU report, even if they want to censor the names, all the province needs is a magic marker and a few minutes’ time. Well, they also need the political will to do it. Whether the province is being sincere about having that political will may be the only actual question that is still to be answered.