The Canadian Government Launched an “Idea Dialogue” to Promote Transparency

Tony Clement, presumably discussing open-source, hyper-connected idea dialogues for technologists and data scientists alike. via Flickr user icannphotos.

At a time when transparency within the Canadian government feels as if it’s reached an all-time low—given that access to information policies have been further softened, scientists are being muzzled, politicians are redacting the truth from Wikipedia, and our ever-mysterious spy agency CSEC is getting more and more federal cash while continuing an opaque relationship with the NSA—I for one am not impressed with the increasingly secretive government that seems to have little regard for transparency.

That’s why, I guess, the Canadian government launched an online “idea dialogue” for Canadians to suggest ways in which the government can reach a coveted “2.0” status; as if this is 2004, and people are excited about the next frontier of websites that have streamlined, social, multimedia remixability. Corny terminology aside, the idea dialogue’s stated purpose is for you, the Canadian internet user, “to share your ideas on ways the Government of Canada could focus its efforts toward increased openness and transparency.” These suggestions will become the basis of a brand new “Action Plan” that will inform a futuristic government that will hopefully make The Jetsons look like The Flinstones.

This good idea-generating, worldwide web cyberforum is the brainchild of Tony Clement, who has established himself as an internet-friendly politician over the years with such initiatives as a “National Open Data Appathon” at University of Toronto. He was also proven wrong by a recent report on Motherboard regarding the government’s interest in monitoring social media, a practice he said is done simply to aggregate citizen reactions to policies in a way that is “not personal to an individual,” but in reality, in at least one case, is a way for the government to collect information on specific individuals who post dissenting messages about government decisions.

So, while Tony has certainly crafted himself as a man-of-the-future who purports to see the Canadian economy moving towards data openness and increased transparency, it’s hard to really believe it.

Even still, the Canadian government’s latest idea dialogue is a functioning forum for Canadians to suggest new policies to the feds, and there are some very solid suggestions up there. For example, Sean Michael Holman, director of the Canadian Association of Journalists, wrote a letter calling for greater access to information privileges.

In the letter, he points out that there have been numerous suggestions from information commissioners to modernize Canada’s Access to Information laws. He stresses “civil servants [must be able] to freely speak to members of the media without interference or involvement from communications staff,” which is a major issue in the government today, and there is precedent for such restrictions being akin to censorship:

“In the United States, the presidents of the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Club recently described limitations on that freedom as having ‘the same effect as censorship. It hides problems that need to be exposed.’”

As a journalist who regularly tries to get comment from government agencies and representatives, more often than not, I expect to be ignored, deflected, or fed generic responses that have been copy-pasted from press releases and highly manicured official statements. And this is an experience that is shared throughout the industry of Canadian journalism.

Beyond simply trying to get a comment from a politician, our Access to Information system, wherein any citizen or journalist can request specific information from government bodies, is in a state of disrepair. Writing for Maclean’s in April, Jennifer Ditchburn reported on “systemic interference” from Conservative staffers who tried to “thwart” requests for information on various topics, including a “sensitive asbestos file” and “Barack Obama’s visit to Canada.”

Plus, as the Toronto Star reported just a few days ago, a third of all Access to Information requests take at least four months to process, which makes the whole idea of government accountability a sluggish and ineffective ideal that, in reality, is not very useful. In fact, according to the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act, government departments have 30 days to respond once they receive a request, with additional days only granted for specific circumstances. On top of that, when requests are fulfilled, journalists often receive highly redacted documents that essentially defeat the purpose of an Access to Information system in the first place.

Beyond our sloppy Access to Information system, another suggestion pertains to the amount of customized software that the Government of Canada produces. A citizen who goes by “Gray OB” suggests that much of that software should be made to be open source:

“The government of Canada (GOC) produces more software (aka. applications, code, computer programs, scripts…) than you might think… If more of the software produced in the GOC was open source software (OSS) Canadians would have a larger say in the data produced, citizens and business would be able to use the software to be more efficient in their work and the GOC would get to improve its software by receiving feedback and contributions from the public.”

Given Revenue Canada’s recent failure to identify the Heartbleed bug, which led to the arrest of a teenager who exploited it by allegedly stealing 900 social insurance numbers, Canadians probably would be better off if the software that houses our most private government data could be examined by the country-at-large, so gaping security holes could be noticed faster, without compromising any private data in the process.

At the time of this writing, the open source suggestion is the “most popular” idea in Tony Clement’s idea dialogue matrix.

The second most popular suggestion is for “Open Science,” which is a one-line suggestion: “Provide free online public access to federally funded scientific research.” Given that this research is funded by public money anyhow, you would think this would be a no-brainer—but given the poor state of scientific transparency our government has established, this sounds more like a little kid’s dream to have a pet unicorn one day rather than a policy that the government would actually implement.

Ultimately, it’s a nice gesture to see a government create a message board for citizens to publish their deepest, transparency-producing desires, but there are so many examples of the Canadian government choosing to abandon transparency that this whole system feels like a bit of a fuck-you.

While the Canadian government has made some progress in the past couple of years when it comes to transparency—like publishing summaries of all successful Access to Information requests on government websites, or the launch of the Open Data Portal “which now has more than 272,000 datasets from 20 departments”—there is a lot of room for improvement, particularly when it comes to government accountability to journalists, access to scientific research, and better government software.

I can’t imagine that Clement's online idea dialogue is going to remedy transparency problems that have been obvious for quite some time. And to be fair, the Harper government is the first Canadian administration to truly deal with the social media age and the whirlwind of data available, so this is a new challenge, and it’s not as if the Americans are doing a great job with transparency either, what with their domestic mass surveillance and blocking of journalist information requests and all. But it’s certainly time to take the lead, and create a functional system of accountability and transparency that actually works.

So, prove me wrong, Canadian government! Prove me wrong.

@patrickmcguire