I, for one, welcome our new Conservative overlords

Well, no, but here are some policies we might be able to agree on

I fully expect to spend the duration of the coming Parliament making a list of things to be undone in the next. However, the Conservatives have control of the government now, having won a modest mandate for change and have the opportunity to show Canadians like myself that they can be entrusted with the government side of the House. There are a lot of things the Conservatives could do that would fit in very nicely with the themes they ran on that I would happily endorse. In the spirit of cooperation necessary for a minority government to work, the No More Shall I Roam editorial board will, over a few posts, offer some policy proposals that should meet with both Conservative and NMSIR approval.

Proposal 1: Accountability: Rewrite the Access to Information Act

The Conservatives ran largely on corruption/accountability. From a statement issued soon after the election:

Our first priority will be to clean up government, make it more open and more accountable to taxpayers. We will do this by way of the federal Accountability Act. Given that we expect the release of Judge Gomery’s second report and since every party ran on platforms that included accountability measures, I’m confident that we will find broad-based consensus to move forward on these changes and on this legislation.

The Conservatives haven't yet given a comprehensive description of what will be in the Accountability Act. Likely it will contain new restrictions on what both lobbyists and parliamentarians can and cannot do, and on how contracts are tendered. While there are more prohibitions which could be useful, the scandal that launched the Gomery Inquiry did not happen because of loopholes in existing laws; they were allowed to continue because there was not enough public scrutiny and transparency. In particular, the Canadian Newspaper Association, in a February press release, the Canadian Newspaper Association President said:

"The inquiry has heard how top officials deliberately withhold information from the public and order bureaucrats to twist the rules to prevent the truth from getting out," Ms. Kothawala said.
   "There is nothing to indicate that these practices have stopped. The credibility of the entire regime of access to information has been shaken and the only remedy is rigorous reform. When freedom of information works properly, not only is it a disincentive to abuse, but you find out about it faster and can deal with it more expeditiously," she said.

One major impediment to transparency in the Canadian federal government is inadequacies in Canada's Access to Information Act. The act, which was no doubt written in good faith, actually makes it relatively easy and inexpensive for individuals to obtain particular documents from the government. However, there are fairly serious failings, which I have written about before. In particular, if you don't know exactly what document you are looking for, or in what department it resides, you are out of luck. There is no repository of released documents, so even if, unbeknownst to you, someone else has already gone to the trouble of finding a memo you'd find relevent, you won't have access to it unless you go through the same steps. In an internet-enabled world, this is simply unforgivable. So is the fact that there is no central Access agency; rather there are separate agencies in each governmental department. There is an ombudsman, but with no teeth; the ombudsman can only make reccomendations. Exemptions, including one for `Cabinet confidences', are far too broad, and have no expiry.

As a result, here is my first policy proposal for the new Conservative government, one that we should be able to agree on, and one that in addition ought to win some friends in the press corps. The desired outcome is greatly increased transparency within the government, and increased access to the workings for citizens, journalists, and researchers.

PCompletely rewrite the Access to Information act, on the following principles:

• Canada's government is our government, and self-governance means the ability for detailed examiniation of government workings.
• Unless there is a pressing public-interest reason for a particular document not to be made public -- immediate national security implications, ongoing criminal investigation, or individual privacy concerns -- Canadian government documents should be available to Canadians. The onus must be on the government to demonstrate that a document remain secret.
• Requests for documents go through a single federal Access agency, run by an independant Director with authority to compel documents from departments, crown corporations, or even the Privy Council. Existing Access agencies within departments would then become part of the infrastructure connecting the centralized federal Access agency to the departments.
• After 25 years, documents automatically become available. Some reasonable mechanism must be available for the goverment for the extremely rare cases of those documents where even 25 years later, public interest weighs more heavily for keeping a document secret than in making it public. Such an appeal would have to be reviewed every five years.
• A central repository, either by department or nationally, run by the National Archives, should be made, where all government documents that are clearly not sensitive should automatically go to be stored and broadly categorized. This leaves the Access to Information process only to documents that need some consideration before being made available.
• When available in electronic form, these documents should be available online.
• Documents that are opened under the Access to Information act would be released not only to the individual requesting the documents, but to the repository as well.
• Electronic documents routinely generated within the government should be saved in an open format (eg, not a proprietary format like this year's format of Microsoft Word) so that the documents remain accessible and searchable years later.

Most OECD nations implemented some sort of access to information legislation in the '70s or '80s. This rewrite of the law would place Canada in a leadership role in making governmental workings accessible to its citizens, and would meet the Conservative's stated goal of increasing accountability of the government. The Conservative government should include such a measure in its Federal Accountability Act.