NDP & Liebrals Leak Confidential Documents

[X Royal]

There are certain journalists (and I'll use that term loosely) whose works need to be taken with a healthy dose of salt because of their blatant political spin - he's but one of them.

Same can be said about certain members here.

 

[a_majoor]

The government may not be making much of a deal about this in order to minimize the significance of the story to outsiders. The best way to judge the truth  or seriousness of these allegations would be to see if the Liberals and NDP will be invited to future closed door meetings or not.

You may recall the NDP in particular are prone to do stupid stuff like this (the potential of the UAE to provide troops and material assistance in Afghanistan was scuttled due to an NDP leak; one can only speculate how things may have happened differently with an Islamic military force engaged in Afghanistan against the Taliban), which makes me wonder why on earth anyone would be inviting them into these meetings in the first place.

 

[ModlrMike]

The government may not be making much of a deal about this in order to minimize the significance of the story to outsiders. The best way to judge the truth  or seriousness of these allegations would be to see if the Liberals and NDP will be invited to future closed door meetings or not.

You may recall the NDP in particular are prone to do stupid stuff like this (the potential of the UAE to provide troops and material assistance in Afghanistan was scuttled due to an NDP leak; one can only speculate how things may have happened differently with an Islamic military force engaged in Afghanistan against the Taliban), which makes me wonder why on earth anyone would be inviting them into these meetings in the first place.

This is precisely why the situation is win-win for the opposition parties:

Win Nr 1 - leak documents to embarrass the government; and

Win Nr 2 - when you're not invited back, claim the government is secretive.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Judging by the posted material the leak is minimal, basically everyone knows a political solution is the end game, just that no one wishes to speak the obvious which is the political solution requires the dismemberment of Iraq.

 

[Edward Campbell]

One way to reduce the leakage is to make access to information easier, but, as the Globe and Mail's Bill Curry explains in this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that journal, there are problems:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/globe-politics-insider/trudeaus-open-government-plan-guaranteed-to-make-waves-in-ottawa/article26962569/

Trudeau’s ‘open government’ plan guaranteed to make waves in Ottawa

SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

Bill Curry
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Oct. 26, 2015

Parliament Hill is in for a major shakeup should Justin Trudeau follow through with his ambitious pledge to reform Question Period, give more power to committees and allow all government documents to be available by default.

The e-mails of political staffers working in the Prime Minister’s Office and for cabinet ministers would no longer be exempt from the Access to Information Act. Parliamentary committees would be given more research money and chairpersons would be elected by secret ballot, rather than appointed by the PMO. Free votes would be the norm, rather than the exception.

Those are a few of the “open government” promises that Mr. Trudeau, now prime-minister-designate, approved in his party’s election platform.

During the campaign, Mr. Trudeau sided with critics who have long argued that the centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office is a growing trend that started more than three decades ago under his father, Pierre Trudeau.

“I actually quite like the symmetry of me being the one who’d end that,” Mr. Trudeau said in a campaign interview with the CBC. “I think we get better public policy when it’s done openly and transparently.”

Some of Mr. Trudeau’s promises will likely prove challenging in practice. The e-mails of political staffers have always been exempt from the Access to Information Act. The law allows citizens to request copies of internal government records, which can be partially or fully redacted by officials under certain conditions.

The veil of secrecy over those e-mails was lifted earlier this year due to disclosures in the criminal trial of Senator Mike Duffy. The e-mail conversations between PMO staffers proved to be explosive, raising questions as to who knew what at the highest levels of power as political aides attempted to contain a controversy over the Senator’s expenses.

While defending himself in the Senate, Mr. Duffy portrayed Parliament Hill as a place where politicians take “dictation from kids in short pants,” a common description of the power of political staff.

Andrew MacDougall, who served as outgoing Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s communications director and had some of his own e-mails revealed during the Duffy trial, said in an interview that political staff may turn to mobile messaging apps like Snapchat for sensitive conversations in order to avoid the Access to Information Act.

“It will go back to a more verbal culture,” Mr. MacDougall predicted. “I’m a skeptic at whether any changes to [access legislation] will change habits. Political staff are always going to face tough issues. They’re always going to have to resolve them. They’ll always need candour in both discussing what potential routes to take to nip things in the bud or how to deal with an issue. And whether that now happens more face to face or through things like [Blackberry] Messenger, Whatsapp, Snapchat, you name it. There are many things that are not e-mail that will still let political operatives deal with sensitive issues.”

Other open government measures promised by the Liberals include reforming the Access to Information Act to give the Information Commissioner the power to make binding orders on the release of documents; opening up meetings of the Board of Internal Economy, which manages the House of Commons budget, to the public, “except in rare cases”; appointing an advertising commissioner to help the Auditor-General ensure that government advertising is non-partisan; striking an all-party committee to study electoral reform and introducing legislation to change Canada’s voting system within 18 months; creating a non-partisan process to advise the Prime Minister on Senate appointments; reforming Question Period so that the Prime Minister will sometimes answer all questions on a particular day, and longer questions and answers will be allowed. Another key change would be that an all-party committee would be given the power and clearance to oversee the operations of all of Canada’s national security agencies.

Don Lenihan, a government transparency advocate with the Canada2020 think tank who recently chaired an open government advisory team for the Ontario government, said the federal Liberal plans have the potential of shifting power away from the PMO and giving MPs a greater role in developing policy and challenging decisions of cabinet.

He said there will need to be debate on how to improve transparency while still giving decision-makers the ability to debate issues in private where appropriate.

“It is very ambitious,” he said. “If they do all of this stuff, it should change pretty fundamentally the way a lot of things work and hopefully go a big step in the direction of halting or redirecting that kind of whole trend that’s been under way for 35 or 40 years.”

The easy one first: reform of question period is looooooong overdue. The first reform I would like to see is "no scripts," it should be "out of order" for a member to read anything while asking his question. If a question is too full of data to be memorized then it should be a written question. I agree with weekly or bi-weekly 'Prime Minister's Questions' with the PM not being required to attend QP on any other days.

Access to Information is sticky. Of course legitimate SECRETS can and will be excluded, but first we need to retrain everyone in what a SECRET is not: something stupid that embarrasses a minister or a general is not a SECRET and misclassifying information to avoid embarrassment should in itself, be a serious breach of the Access to Information Act which ought to have very severe consequences, including imprisonment. (In my personal experience several senior and junior officials and officers, up to and including ADMs and LGens were guilty of just such abuses of the security classification system, and they were worthy of nothing but our contempt.)

The hard one is "Cabinet Confidences." The very rock upon which our system of government rests is the confidentiality of the advice which public servants and political advisers offer to ministers. Anything which impedes that good advice will do real damage to both the machinery of government and democracy, itself.

 

[George Wallace]

My question to many who think that they should know everything is this two part question:

"Do you have a home alarm system?"

"Will you post your alarm code here?"

 

[McG]

My question to many who think that they should know everything is this two part question:

"Do you have a home alarm system?"

"Will you post your alarm code here?"

That is a bit red herring.  As noted by ERC, Protected and Classified information would have to be excluded from an “open government” initiative.  Your analogy to a home alarm code is an analogy to Protected and Classified information.