To judge by a report released Tuesday by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the outgoing Harper government was unduly optimistic in its forecasts and estimates. (thats putting it ‘nicely’!)……that suggests that the Conservatives’ heralded return to a budgetary surplus was in fact a mirage that could not have been achieved without
Continue readingTag: access to information
Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Julie Delahanty discusses the need for Canada’s federal government to rein in rising inequality. And Tim Stacey duly challenges the excuse that today’s poor people just aren’t poor enough to deserve any consideration. – Amy Goodman interviews Joseph Stiglitz about the serious problems
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Liz Farmer discusses the growing body of evidence showing that high-end tax cuts do nothing to build the economy for anybody but the few privileged beneficiaries. And Stephen Kimber writes about the billions of dollars Canada loses to tax evasion every year,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Emily Dugan writes about the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s finding that young UK adults are facing the worst economic prospects of the last several generations. And Betty Ann Adam reports on Charles Plante’s work on the value of a living wage, both
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – I’ll start in on my own review of the NDP’s election campaign over the next few days, focusing on what I see as being the crucial decisions as the campaign played out. But for those looking for some of what’s been written already,
Continue readingDemocracy Under Fire: Do Not Be Muzzled.
Do not be muzzled Oct 19th, get out and have your say on who you wish to represent you in parliament, bearing in mind that many of the promises are just that and may either be a long time coming or reduced or eliminated once in power. Particularly should the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Oxfam points out that without a major redistributive effort, hundreds of millions of people will be trapped in extreme poverty around the globe no matter how much top-end growth is generated.And Michael Valpy writes that the Cons have gone out of their
Continue readingDemocracy Under Fire: Ottawa’s war on data
Macleans recently published an article outlining the failure of the Harper regime to not only collect information on the true state of Canada’s citys, towns and villages and economy but failure to KEEP historical data. Whilst touting better access to information by digatalizing information and ‘centralizing’ and combining various websites
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Michal Rozworski highlights the deeper economic issues which are receiving minimal attention compared to deficits and minor amounts of infrastructure spending in Canada’s federal election: In the long term, two decades of Liberal and Conservative austerity have left Canada with a revenue problem,
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: Information commissioner takes Harper to court for withholding Senate expenses scandal documents
Suzanne Legault, Canada’s federal information commissioner, is taking Stephen Harper to the Federal Court for withholding information relating to the Senate expenses scandal. The post Information commissioner takes Harper to court for withholding Senate expenses scandal documents appeared first on The Canadian Progressive.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – David Climenhaga sees Jeremy Corbyn’s resounding victory in the Labour leadership race as compelling evidence that progressive hope can win over centre-right fearmongering, while Michael Laxer takes some lessons away for Canadian politics. And Paul Krugman notes that there’s a reason why
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Following his resounding win to become Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn describes the proper role of government as a vehicle for shared benefits: We understand aspiration and we understand that it is only collectively that our aspirations can be realised. Everybody aspires to
Continue readingDemocracy Under Fire: Harpoon for Youth
We all know that getting our younger voters out is even more important this time than ever before and that it is hard to get many of them engaged in the cluster fk we laughingly call democracy. Who can blame them, even those of us who are ‘engaged’ are getting
Continue readingDemocracy Under Fire: Harper History, Part 7 – Suppressed Information – Advertising Overload
In reviewing the events for this period I was struck by how important is is to look back at the undemocratic and secretive actions of the Harper regime, even I, who has written frequently and consistently on this subject had forgotten so many of the things done to diminish our
Continue readingDemocracy Under Fire: Harper History, Part 6B – Budget Reintroduced – More Secrecy
May 2011 – summer 2012 The first few months of the Harper majority made it clear that the long forgotten “open and accountable” promise given when first coming to power is exactly the opposite of the regimes actual intentions. There are repeated attempts to put even the most innocuous committee
Continue readingDemocracy Under Fire: Voices for Democracy
Voices-Voix is a non-partisan coalition of Canadians and Canadian organizationscommitted to defending our collective and individual rights to dissent, advocacy and democratic space. They have documented attacks against organizations, individuals and institutions that have raised their voices, to show the pattern of government silencing those who exercise their right to dissent. They have
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: The politics of information #nlpoli
A couple of recent post are reminders of how important it is to take a look at issues in the province from another perspective. On June 10, you will find a post about crab fishermen from New Brunswick who want to sell their catch to a company near Corner Brook.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Elizabeth Warren reminds us (PDF) that previous trade agreements were packaged with the same promises of labour and environmental standards being used to sell the latest versions – and that there’s been no enforcement whatsoever of the elements of the deals which
Continue readingThe Cracked Crystal Ball II: A Dangerous Change In Law
In his latest abuse of the legislative processes, Harper has slide a particularly slimy bit into the 2015 budget implementation bill: The Harper government moved to retroactively rewrite Canada’s access to information law in order to prevent possible criminal charges against the RCMP, The Canadian Press has learned. An
Continue readingThe Cracked Crystal Ball II: A Dangerous Change In Law
The Harper government moved to retroactively rewrite Canada’s access to information law in order to prevent possible criminal charges against the RCMP, The Canadian Press has learned.
An unheralded change buried in last week’s 167-page omnibus budget bill exempted all records from the defunct long-gun registry, and also any “request, complaint, investigation, application, judicial review, appeal or other proceeding under the Access to Information Act or the Privacy Act,” related to those old records.
The unprecedented, retroactive changes — access-to-information experts liken them to erasing the national memory — are even more odd because they are backdated to the day the Conservatives introduced legislation to kill the gun registry, not to when the bill received royal assent.
The date effectively alters history to make an old government bill come into force months before it was actually passed by Parliament.
Oh, but this gets better. It turns out that this is intended to squelch an ongoing investigation by a parliamentary officer – the Information Officer, Suzanne Legault.
In an interview airing later Thursday on CBC News Network’s Power & Politics, Legault expanded on the ramifications of passing these amendments.
“What this does is that it erases the right of the requester to have ever made this request. It erases the right of the requester to have ever complained to my office. It erases all of the investigative powers that I have used during this investigation. And it erases the referral that I have made to the attorney general of Canada. And it erases the recommendations I have made to the minister.
“What these provisions do is they actually erase any potential administrative, civil or criminal liability for any actors involved throughout the investigation and in the destruction of those records in contravention to the Access to Information Act.”
Creating retroactive legislation in Canada that reaches back years in time is unusual, although technically legal as long as it isn’t a criminal code change.
“An argument has been made that there are elements in the information act, the Access to Information Act, that contradict something in that other piece of legislation. At best that is a loophole,” he said at an event in Windsor, Ont.
“I’m not sure there really is a contradiction, but to be perfectly clear, the government is clarifying the information act to make sure it is in full conformity with Parliament’s already expressed wishes on the long-gun registry that the RCMP has executed as they were required to do according to the law.”
The RCMP also rebuffed Legault’s accusations, saying it did nothing wrong.
“The RCMP disputes the OIC’s (Office of the Information Commissioner’s) view that it denied a right of access under the Access to Information Act by destroying records that were responsive to the request,” Sgt. Harold Pfleiderer said in a statement. ( CBC )
However, in this case, it is quite clear that Harper is trying to squelch an investigation into possibly illegal actions of the RCMP and other government officials with respect to the Long Gun Registry data. So, even if this legislation is technically “legal”, it doesn’t mean it is right. No government should be using legislative fiat to make its indiscretions “disappear”.