Mark Carney's System of Secrecy

**Ken Rubin** (0:01)
Canadaland.

**Matt Malone** (0:02)
Funded by you.

**Noor Azrieh** (0:05)
Hey, it's Noor Azrieh. Today, we're talking politics. This week, the Carney government's addiction to secrecy, and how Canada's right to know is facing its biggest setback in decades.

**Matt Malone** (0:20)
We have Big Daddy syndrome and everyone likes Carney right now, but I think in time, this will sort of become the downfall.

**Noor Azrieh** (0:27)
That's this episode after the break. I love to complain.
I think it's possibly one of my defining personality traits. I complain about politicians who answer a completely different question than the one I asked. I complain about staffers who promise they'll circle back and then ghost me like I'm a three on Hinge. It's a journalist thing. We all complain, we love to complain, but there is one complaint that rules above all. The access to information system is so broken.
You wait months, sometimes years for records the law says you're supposed to get in 30 days. You do a little dance with government employees over extensions and exemptions to finally get a PDF in your inbox with hundreds of pages smeared in ink a few shades darker than Trudeau's face at that Arabian night scala.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:50)
I didn't understand how hurtful this is to people who live with discrimination every single day.

**Noor Azrieh** (1:55)
And somehow, despite all of that, access to information has exposed some of the biggest scandals in Canadian history. Like in 1984, an access to information request exposed that federal health officials knew that people were contracting HIV from tainted blood products, yet untested blood continued to circulate. Or in 1993, when Canadian peacekeepers tortured and killed a Somali teenager, access to information requests uncovered that senior military officials had altered documents before releasing them to journalists. And then came probably the most iconic access to information story, the sponsorship scandal. Access to information requests revealed that millions of dollars in federal contracts had been funneled to liberal connected firms for little or no work. It's a scandal that helped bring down the post-Krechen liberal party and pushed us into Harper's era. We know all of that because a journalist filed a form and refused to let the government say no. Access to information is one of the few tools journalists and ordinary people have to force the government to show us what it's doing in the shadows. And Mark Carney is trying to make it harder to do that by fundamentally rewriting the laws that govern our right to know.
This episode is about Canada's access to information system. The bureaucratic nightmare that somehow managed to expose corruption, scandals, and cover ups for four decades. And why the people who know it best think it's about to get much worse. Let's get into it.
Before Canadians had a legal right to ask the federal government for its records, there was Ken Rubin.

**Ken Rubin** (4:20)
I'm alive and well.

**Noor Azrieh** (4:21)
We're asking you to do a lot here.

**Ken Rubin** (4:23)
Oh, I'm used to doing a lot.

**Noor Azrieh** (4:26)
That's good. Ken Rubin is a transparency activist. And depending on who you ask, he's either Canada's access to information godfather or a huge pain in the ass.

**Ken Rubin** (4:41)
You're at war. I'm an information warrior. Somebody's called me the bad boy or the godfather or bastard or whatever.

**Noor Azrieh** (4:49)
He spent more than five decades asking government's questions they probably didn't want to answer.
Long before Canadians had a legal right to government records, Ken was getting them anyway. He haunted government libraries, dug through obscure reports, and cold called bureaucrats to see what they would tell him. He says Ottawa wasn't exactly an open book back then, but it also wasn't yet a bureaucracy that had learned to treat every single request like a hostage negotiation.

**Ken Rubin** (5:27)
The bureaucracy was smaller, and they weren't trained totally in the code of silence.

**Noor Azrieh** (5:34)
By the 1970s, alongside journalists, academics, lawyers, and civil liberties advocates, Ken pushed Ottawa to recognize a pretty simple idea. If the government works for the public, the public should be able to see what it's doing, like in many other countries at the time. The United States already had freedom of information legislation.

**Ken Rubin** (5:58)
Oh my God, that's unbelievable.

**Noor Azrieh** (6:01)
Australia and New Zealand were building their own systems.

**SPEAKER_5** (6:04)
Let there be a thousand blossoms bloomed as far as I'm concerned.

**Noor Azrieh** (6:08)
Parliament finally passed the Access to Information Act in 1982, the federal law that gives Canadians the legal right to ask for records held by government institutions, all in the hopes that it would make government more open, more accountable and more transparent. The press treated it like a hallelujah moment.