Trudeau once spoke of a new era of transparent government. We're still waiting

Shortly before Parliament adjourned for the summer last week, the House of Commons ethics committee tabled the findings from its study of the federal government's access to information system — the program through which citizens and journalists can (in theory) obtain information in the government's possession.

The 118-page report makes 38 recommendations aimed at fixing what is widely considered a broken system. But in a dissenting opinion, the Liberal members of the committee quibbled with nine of those calls and even questioned the sincerity of the committee's Conservative members.

"The Conservative Party of Canada would never implement such a recommendation should it form government again," the Liberals wrote in response to the committee's recommendation that cabinet confidences no longer be automatically exempt from disclosure.

It is indisputably a lot easier to call for a major expansion of government transparency from the safety of the opposition benches. The Liberals themselves are well acquainted with that phenomenon.

"Once I look at the trend lines in democracy, the empowering of citizens and activists, I know that the government of the future is going to be very, very different than governments of the past," Trudeau said at a sparsely attended event in April 2015.

At the time, Trudeau was promoting his own proposals for access-to-information reform — one of which would be significantly scaled back after he came to office.

Back then, Trudeau was famously promising a government that would be "open by default." That promise aged poorly. It has been made to look even worse over the past month.

But beyond even the basic value of transparency or any single change to the Access to Information Act, Trudeau once seemed to see the possibility of a deeper conversation about public policy — one that would push both governments and citizens.

"I think we're going to have to embark on a completely different style of government," he said. "A government that both accepts its responsibilities to be open and transparent, but also a population that doesn't mind lifting the veil to see how sausages are made. That there is a dual responsibility, in changing towards more open and transparent functioning, that really will go to a deep shift in how government operates."

Eight years later, Trudeau would be hard-pressed to say that he has paved the way for any such "deep shift."

Transparency in the Trudeau era

Trudeau could plausibly argue the business of the federal government is now conducted with greater openness than it  was before the Liberals won power in 2015.

A committee of parliamentarians is now empowered to review classified information. The office of the parliamentary budget officer has been made fully independent and is better funded. The Prime Minister's Office has published the mandate letters issued to cabinet ministers and the government has made some piecemeal efforts to report publicly on progress made toward its campaign commitments — such as a regularly updated tally of drinking water advisories in Indigenous communities.

Trudeau has made himself readily accessible — perhaps even overly so — to reporters in news conferences and to voters in town hall tours. And the government has invested in data collection and restored the long-form census, measures that could provide a better sense of whether public policy is translating into results.

But simply being better than the last guy might not count for much. And whatever the Trudeau government can say for itself, those claims would be drowned out by increasingly loud complaints.

The ethics committee report was released exactly a week after the information commissioner tabled her own damning report on the system. Both reports only added to an already voluminous record of grievances.

And on the same day the committee tabled its report, House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota publicly rebuked public servants who were caught trying to provide as little information as possible in response to a written question from Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner.

Too many secrets, not enough sunlight

And the federal government's transparency problem is not restricted to the access-to-information system. 

Thomas Juneau, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on security and intelligence, has argued that transparency could be an integral part of efforts to fight foreign interference in Canadian politics.

But he told MPs recently that the federal government suffers from "an epidemic of overclassification" — that too much government information is considered top secret.

Then there's the question of how the government and its spokespeople communicate (or fail to communicate) on a daily basis. The Trudeau government might be willing to talk to reporters and voters but it generally remains reluctant to say more than the absolute minimum.

Many of these frustrations can be traced to simple risk aversion: the more information a government releases, the more freely a politician speaks, the more likely it is that something embarrassing will come out. And public officials aren't wrong to assume that journalists and political rivals lay in wait, ready to gleefully pounce on anything that resembles a mistake. (Trudeau learned that lesson very early in his time as Liberal leader.)

To those concerns there is a simple reply: transparency is a matter of democratic accountability. That is a foundational concern. But Trudeau's comments in 2015 also suggested he saw a broader value in greater openness.

Secrecy as a form of regulation

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late United States senator who once chaired a federal commission on government secrecy, said that secrecy is a "form of regulation." And just as too much regulation can bog down economic activity, overbearing secrecy can stifle the conversation about public policy.

Fostering better public debate is a worthy goal. And transparency that allows Canadians to understand the basis for government decisions could, in theory, lead to a richer conversation.

Maybe it's not expecting too much to think that all sides are capable of handling a more nuanced debate. Consider the example of the public hearings on the Trudeau government's use of the Emergencies Act. Within the disclosures released during those hearings were a few unflattering text messages.

But the greater result was that Canadians were given a chance to understand better what happened, and why. The sky didn't fall and neither did the government.

A lot would need to change for that level of transparency to become the norm rather than the exception. And the next opportunity for significant reform might not come until there's another change in government — when another party comes to power with grand promises to be more transparent and feels, at least initially, some need to make good on those promises.

On the other hand, the Liberals might eventually remember that one day they won't be in government — at which point they might really wish it was easier to scrutinize what the government is doing.

There are lots of reasons for an entrenched government to resist greater transparency. But a government that knows it won't be in office for another decade might want to leave behind a better set of rules (think of Jean Chretien's late interest in campaign finance reform).

It's never too late to push the democratic conversation forward.