Stop the secrecy
For a governing party supposedly committed to “open government,” Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals sure appear to be a secretive lot.
The province’s financial accountability watchdog, Stephen LeClair, called out the government for its apparent aversion to transparency on Tuesday, claiming he can’t get the information he needs to help hold the government to account.
The problem is the Liberals’ overreliance on cabinet secrecy — the oldest trick in the obscurantist government’s handbook. LeClair says the Liberals so often invoke the loophole that he is no longer able to accurately assess the government’s budget forecasts and program costs — the very functions for which his office was created.
Cabinet secrecy exists for a reason. Government ministers should be allowed to engage in candid deliberations on important issues without being constrained by political considerations. But as we have seen at the federal level, it can be abused.
During the Stephen Harper years, claims of cabinet secrecy nearly doubled, part of a larger effort to avoid the scrutiny of Ottawa’s own budget watchdog and Parliament more generally. On secrecy, the Harper Tories are a bad model to emulate.
Sadly, LeClair’s critique is nothing new. It’s consistent with a larger pattern of government recalcitrance.
In fact, the Liberals never really wanted the watchdog in the first place. They were pressured into creating the financial accountability office by NDP Leader Andrea Horwath in exchange for her party propping up the then-minority Liberal government in May 2013.
Even after that agreement, it took the government almost two years, until February 2015, to actually fill the office.
And if there was a honeymoon for LeClair, it was short-lived. By May of that year he was already complaining about government secrecy around the sale of Hydro One — along with seven other independent officers of the legislature. By July, his frustration was on full public display. He accused the Liberals of “stonewalling” and said he hoped his legacy would be making the government more transparent.
It’s an admirable goal — and one the Wynne government has made much of supporting.
But is Queen’s Park sincere in its commitment to transparency? While the government insisted Tuesday that requests for information from LeClair’s office are dealt with “by non-partisan officials, not by the political staff,” the financial watchdog says he believes deputy ministers have been given “political direction on how to interpret cabinet confidences.”
Whatever the source, this secrecy is unacceptable. Kathleen Wynne says she “has real respect” for LeClair’s office. She should show it by allowing him to do his work. It’s time to prove that “open government” is more than an empty slogan.