Conservative Government Wins Top Marks!

Secrecy is a Harper trademark - journalists

Conservative government wins top marks again in reverse competition.

OTTAWA, May 20: Stephen Harper's office leads the list of nominees for this year's Code of Silence Award, to be handed out by the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) later this month.

The prime minister was cited by several members of the organization for having "muzzled" cabinet ministers, civil servants, and, particularly, professional scientists. He has forced Tory Mps to vet their comments to reporters through his office, and his handlers have "cherry-picked questions from friendly journalists and blackballed reporters who dared to ask questions out of turn," according to a CAJ news release. The government "has stalled and denied freedom of information requests and, most recently, the PMO suspended a key access to information database."

"Killing the registry was the last straw for many reporters," said CAJ President Mary Agnes Welch. "There's a broad and deliberate attempt on the part of Harper and his staff to limit Canadians' right to know by ducking reporters' questions, hoarding documents that ought to be public and choreographing nearly every word uttered by civil servants and cabinet ministers."

The CAJ's Code of Silence Award honours the most secretive government or department in Canada. Last year's winner was the federal Department of Foreign Affairs for denying the existence of documents related to the treatment of Afghan detainees that were requested under federal Access to Information legislation.

This year's nominees include:

- Transport Canada for proposed draconian secrecy provisions in amendments to the Aeronautics Act which, if implemented, will see a veil of secrecy fall over all information reported by airlines about performance, safety violations, aviation safety problems and their resolution. None of this information will be available through the Access to Information Act even as de-personalized data.

- The BC government's climate change secretariat for refusing to reveal the credentials of the secretariat's head or the contents of stakeholder presentations and for holding closed-door meetings and symposiums. The secretariat has also stymied the release of its staffing and funding levels and quietly altered the province's freedom of information legislation to keep everything it discusses under an official cone of silence.

- The Ontario government for the secretive tendering process involved in building nuclear power plants worth $26 billion. The request for proposals prohibits bidders from speaking to the media, and the site selection process squeezes out public input.

- Ontario's Ministry of Children and Youth Services for their two-year delay in releasing daycare records following a freedom of information request by the Toronto Star. The records revealed serious problems at several hundred of the 4,400 licensed daycares in the province. A day after the findings were published, the ministry vowed to make the records public and have since published them on a provincial website.

- The city of Rossland, BC. For forcing a city councillor to resort to freedom of information requests to get documents that should be public and holding closed- door meetings on issues of public importance, and

- The town of Montague, PEI for using loopholes in the provincial Municipalities Act to hold pre-council meetings in the guise of committee of the whole sessions. No formal agenda is created, no minutes are kept, no report is presented to open council and reporters are not allowed to report on discussions that take place during the meetings, which are held a week before the monthly public meeting. When The Eastern Graphic attempted to cover a pre-council meeting, the town's solicitor threatened to seek a court injunction to stop the paper from printing details. 

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