Transparency is a must in pricey deals
When Toronto city council gets around to debating the arrangements (and the cost) of co-hosting the 2026 World Cup this week, at least we’ll all have some idea what they’re talking about.
This is no thanks, really, to the City of Toronto’s government, nor to the World Cup organization FIFA. Instead, credit goes to my Star colleague, Ben Spurr, who through freedom of information requests has recently managed to make public most of the contract outlining most of the terms of our hosting deal.
From cancellation terms (not easy) to traffic co-ordination (good luck), freebie transit rides and the city policing FIFA’s trademarks, it makes some interesting reading. None of it, to my eyes, has the shock value already carried by the incredible skyrocketing costs revealed in a city report — $380 million for hosting six games, up from initial estimates of $45 million six years ago when the deal was signed.
But what should be as disturbing, or more so, is this is the first time in those six years we’ve been able to look at the contract and see what we signed up for. Until this month, it was a secret, one so closely held even Mayor Olivia Chow reported having trouble getting access to the contract terms after she was elected last June.
This is a public deal to host a public event, which commits public resources and spends public dollars. It was signed on behalf of the public, and binds the public to a bunch of obligations. There is absolutely no reason those terms should be secret.
And yet this secrecy seems like part of a larger trend. Look, for example, at the arrangement the provincial government has made with the company Therme to lease a giant parcel of waterfront land at Ontario Place and turn that parkland into a for-profit spa business. What’s in it for us? What is the public to be paid, according to the terms of the lease? What commitments have we made to the company, or what guarantees have we received from them?
See, we don’t know. That’s all secret.
“The terms of the agreement remain confidential,” a spokesperson for the provincial government wrote to me when I asked in 2022. “This is common practice.”
It shouldn’t be common practice. It should be a scandal.
The principle here is not hard to comprehend. It’s the same one behind the “Sunshine List” that ensures you can look up the salaries of the executives who run Ontario Place in a matter of moments. The same one that assures our court proceedings are held in the open and in most cases reported on by the media. The same one that means I can quickly look at the terms of the redevelopment of Exhibition Place land by Hotel X.
If you are doing business on behalf of the public, then what you are doing is the public’s business. We deserve to be able to mind our own business.
How else are we meant to evaluate the job our public servants are doing on our behalf? When the costs and benefits of any government action are kept secret, how is our democratic system supposed to hold that government accountable — or even reward that government for a job well done?
There are times during a negotiation process when, for straightforward practical and strategic purposes, proposed terms need to be kept temporarily confidential — not from the politicians signing the agreement on our behalf, but from the general public. But, once a deal is signed, and the public is on the hook, then virtually all terms should be disclosed immediately.
And there are many situations one can envision — for instance, specific details of security arrangements that may be included in a contract like the one with FIFA — where keeping things confidential makes sense for safety reasons. But again most such secrets should have a time limit on them — once the event has come and gone, those provisions should by default become public information.
The key phrase there is “by default.” The public (and the media, on the public’s behalf ) should automatically have access to any information about government business — contracts, policies, ministerial mandate letters — in the absence of a compelling reason that specific information should be kept secret.
Too often our governments at all levels treat public information in the opposite way. Everything is assumed to be confidential unless there’s a specific reason to publicize it. Reporters need to haggle with communications people for answers to basic questions about what is theoretically already public information. And then reporters often need to invoke time-consuming (and sometimes costly) freedom of information laws to get access to that basic information.
In theory, those freedom of information processes serve a valuable purpose even in an ideal world. The public should often be able to see things like email communications between politicians and civil servants, but making every government email inbox open and searchable seems impractical and invasive. In such cases, it seems perfectly reasonable that a request can be filed and specific relevant information sought out and released in response.
But that’s a far cry from a contract committing the city to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in order to host a public spectacle. Or a contract handing rights to public land over to a private corporation. That’s the kind of information you should be able to just look up on an open, publicly accessible government website.
We’re all well served by Spurr’s reporting to dig up these World Cup contract details. But it would be a backhanded compliment to congratulate FIFA and the government, after six years of secrecy, for agreeing to release the details to him.
Those details should have been public, and easily accessible, from the start.
When the costs and benefits of any government action are kept secret, how is our democratic system supposed to hold that government accountable — or even reward that government for a job well done?