Government Secrecy—the Canadian Disease

MR. HERMANT:

Ladies and gentlemen: In a recent issue of Maclean's, Judith Timson wrote: "In an age where a great many members of our society believe that only five year-olds lie more than politicians, Ged Baldwin is regarded as an honest man."

And a dedicated one.

For nearly twenty years, our guest of honour today has toiled in the House of Commons in a role many regard as that of the unsung hero. To be specific, he has acted as parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, official opposition house leader, chairman of committees on public accounts, justice, constitution, and member of committees on procedure, organization and regulation. In other words, a working parliamentarian.

Ged Baldwin has never opted for the easy road, or the indirect approach to national issues: on one occasion he actually tried to impeach John Turner, Edgar Benson and Otto Lang for contravening the Temporary Wheat Reserves Act of 1956. And on another, he refused a trip to New Zealand, the country of his birth which he left as a child and has never revisited--because provision had been made for the wife of the minister in charge, but no provision had been made for his wife, Beulah.

Ged Baldwin confronts problems. He has been referred to as "very much a man of the west", although he was not born there and has never owned a pair of cowboy boots.

During his legal career which commenced in Alberta in the late 1920s, Ged Baldwin had for clients generally newly immigrant homesteaders, Indians and Metis families. He was principal defence lawyer in twenty-five murder trials during those years. It was in this climate that he first ran into the great issue that has become his torch through his entire political experience. In his own words, "As a young lawyer, I became more aware of the unfairness of the system. Everything was stacked in favour of the Crown. They could get all the information they needed; I couldn't get any."

Thus started his crusade for more openness in government and typically he has pursued it energetically and pointedly. He has worked within the political system--to the extent that he has had private member's bills on the subject die four times on the Commons order paper--and he has tried outside the system as head of the League to Restore Parliamentary Control which has had expressions of support from an estimated two thousand people in a relatively short time.

The issue, he says, is nothing less than the restoration of the government's accountability to the people. Why shouldn't people be able to see the controversial report which led to the banning of saccharine? Why shouldn't the public know what the government knows about mercury pollution in Ontario and arsenic pollution in Yellowknife? Why shouldn't individuals know what facts are in their files in various Ottawa locations and how they got there?

Prime Minister Trudeau said during a recent Liberal policy conference held in this city that Canada already has as much disclosure as the United States, Sweden, or "any other God damn country that claims to be ahead of us". But Ged Baldwin doesn't agree with that statement.

If open government is the basis of democracy, he wonders if Canada, two hundred years behind Sweden in allowing citizens access to public documents and a decade behind the United States in enacting a freedom of information law, could be considered to have been a failure in the exercise?

Mark Twain wrote about the United States, but it pertains equally to us, "It is by the goodness of God that we have in our country three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech; freedom of conscience; and the prudence never to practice either."

It is the level of prudence about which Ged Baldwin is concerned. The invisible and perhaps undefinable line that divides what is good for the government from what is good for its citizens.

Ged Baldwin plans to run for election once again when a federal election is called--it will be his ninth candidacy--and as one of his constituents is quoted in a recent article, "Well, you're a bugger for punishment."

Ladies and gentlemen, I don't believe Ged Baldwin thinks of it as a punishment. I think he would agree with Walter Lippmann, whose comment about newspapers in general applies exactly to his quest, "to bring to light the hidden facts; to set them into relation with each other and make a picture of reality on which men can act."

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure for me to introduce to you the Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament for Peace River, Mr. Gerald W. (Ged) Baldwin; who will address us under the title, "Government Secrecy--the Canadian Disease".

MR. BALDWIN:

On October 11, an historic event took place in Strasbourg, France, when a favourable vote accepted Spain as a member of the Council of Europe and seated its delegation in the parliamentary assembly of the organization, the oldest of the European international parliaments instituted after the war to secure a greater unity and co-operation among European countries.

It has one feature not shared by other European assemblies; namely, the states which belong to it are all signatories to a Convention on Human Rights, with a Commission of Human Rights and a Court of Justice.

What is not well known is that prior to an application being accepted for membership, it is vetted by the assembly with inspection by experts on the Human Rights Commission, and it is necessary to get a clear bill of health on civil rights before the application is accepted.

While we do not belong to the Council of Europe, Canadians are invited, with people from other countries such as Japan, the United States, and Australia, to participate in the debate which takes place every year on the report of the Secretary-General of the OECD.

As an observer, this year, something which really impressed me was the clear relationship which several Spaniards made between the re-establishment of the democratic process in Spain after a lapse of over forty years of dictatorship and their acceptance of the undertaking to put into practice to the fullest extent the conventions of the Charter of Human Rights.

Rene Levesque, who talks glibly about joining such international organizations, might well ponder this, because the treatment of the Inuit people of northern Quebec, and the interference with the traditional and constitutional rights of people in respect of English language rights in Quebec are clear examples of infractions of human rights.

It seems to me that in countries like Canada with a much longer experience in democracy, we are too often inclined to take our freedoms for granted and to forget that the democratic system will only flourish and be healthy, virile and strong if we practise and observe a continuing respect for human rights.

I place particular stress on the question of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to both to give and receive information.

There is another side to this issue. Mr. Van Lennep, the Secretary-General of the OECD, in giving his statement to the parliamentarians, in effect, repeated what he had said before in 1976; warning that, in an economic sense, the need of each nation is for moderate and controlled reflation--enough to take the worst edge off unemployment--but not enough to revive uncontrolled inflation.

That may be good advice but the increase in the indices of prices and the considerable increase in unemployment in Canada shows we have not yet found the correct formula.

May I suggest to you that one of the basic reasons for this is lack of one universal and essential quality: confidence in governments, and belief in what is said by the leaders of government. And without that confidence, there is no trust and without trust, there is unlikely to be the public willingness to accept the proposals of the government and their leaders and the support that they must have.

It is not possible to hear the news almost daily without realizing that we are in difficult times--difficulties which are deep-rooted and tough--but these are problems which societies created and ought to be susceptible to solution; certainly of substantial diminishing by the same human society.

But for this to come about, there has to be a mood of understanding and co-operation between those who govern and those who are governed. This we do not have today and without it, our burdens will not vanish. And this, in turn, hinges on a sharing of knowledge which is the first and strongest line of defence of a society determined to rule itself; so that the public is or can be aware of the facts on which government operates.

The people will forgive--at least within reason--a government that makes mistakes, but will not accept rulers who lie to them. There has been too much of that!

For example, bearing in mind the track record of the government in Canada on the questions of economic forecasting, energy resources, and inflation and controls, why should people give credence to the measures that are being proposed? And this undermining, this rotting away of the public confidence in the government and its leaders, is fast becoming a cancer of malignant proportions.

If anyone wants to take the time to read the ministerial statements which accompanied the launching of most major projects over the last twenty years or more, it will be found that in almost all cases, the costs were always greatly underestimated, through gross negligence or deliberate deception.

We were led to believe by the theoreticians in the bureaucracy that we could look to the state for everything. Politicians in control were quick to take up the rhythm, and these programs were packaged in bright and attractive containers and sold to the public like products in the market place and paid for by printing money.

And now we are treated to the extraordinary spectacle of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance and their friends and supporting mandarins, all the backroom generals, who having pushed the Canadian people into disaster, are retiring into their plush dug-outs and telling us to fight our own way back to safety. They scold us for being too extravagant in our demands and suggest we exercise restraint, a discipline which they never have learned and never will.

In a recent article by Max Henderson, he points out that in ten years Ottawa spending has increased nearly 500 per cent. In the process, the bureaucracy has grown so large, become so complex, and so powerful, that it is like a Frankenstein monster out of control, plunging into waste and non-production. No wonder there is widespread scepticism and disbelief.

We are steadily working towards the extinction of the middle groups in society by fiscal and moral bankruptcy. Initiative is lacking and the individual is vanishing into the monolithic state.

The market place, with its restraints and sensitivity to the nuances of human nature, will disappear. We will be left for the time being with government authoritarianism: fascism with a mild face. And as night follows day, from this will come violence, disorder and extremism. And ask not for whom this particular bell tolls; it tolls for us all.

But we still have a choice. Parliamentary democracy has many faults, but all are curable. If we are bleeding it is from self-inflicted wounds. I have always held to the faith that the eternal wisdom on earth does not lie in our leaders but more in the sum total of all the people in a society; the need is to find a way of distilling that wisdom into the rules we make for conducting our affairs.

We need a legislature with more independence and objectivity; a lessening of rigidity of party discipline; reforms in the Commons so that there will be a true accountability by government to the people for spending and other programs; and finally and most important, open government with freedom of information, because incompetence and corruption are the handmaidens of secrecy.

In campaigning for less secrecy and more openness and honesty in government, we seek several goals:

1. The right of the individual to be informed about government actions in which he is interested or involved.

2. The right of Parliament and the press and other interested groups to have access to the facts upon which government has acted in order that they can scrutinize and, if necessary, challenge the correctness of the program.

3. Most pressing and urgent of all at this time is the need to restore trust and confidence.

If we are to successfully attack major problems of today, unemployment, inflation, energy, balance of payments, social stability and order in our large cities, and the special need in Canada to keep the country bound together in face of the fragile and frayed bonds of Confederation, there must be a sense of mutual respect.

Government, to be effective and believable, must be based on the principle that relevant information in possession of the government is made available on request, except clearly spelt out and limited exemptions such as defence and national security where there is danger to the country; criminal investigations where disclosure would interfere with law enforcement; matters of a private and confidential nature where information has been given on that understanding; certain internal working papers consisting of advice and opinion.

There should be an appeal to an independent tribunal of judicial nature whose decision would be binding. All procedures must be simple, summary and inexpensive. All costs of providing documents must not be so high as to be a disincentive. And there need to be indexes of government documents to permit an applicant to identify what he or she seeks.

We, who support legislation of this kind, have never claimed that such a bill would bring the millennium. But, it would be a giant stride forward to a climate of candour and decency by letting the sunshine and fresh air of public understanding blow through the musty corridors of power. There doesn't seem to be anything formidable or dangerous about this, and such laws have, in fact, worked in Sweden for over two hundred years, in several of the other Scandinavian countries, and in particular in the United States since the amendments which strengthened the American Act in 1974 following Watergate.

Why is it then that a few wilful and perverse people who sit at the pinnacle of power in Ottawa reject these proposals, as they have recently done?

We are told that ours is a unique system of government and will not lend itself to such a scheme. Amazingly enough, this was the same argument that was advanced on behalf of President Nixon to the Supreme Court of the United States when he resisted the publication of the tapes which ultimately led to his resignation.

It is said that such a law will erode frankness and openness between civil servants and their superiors. This is nonsense. I think that most civil servants are no more afraid of being frank than other people engaged in similar jobs in private life. But in any event, we are not asking that all personal advice, opinions and recommendations be made public. Insofar as working papers are concerned, all that is required is that facts and statistical information which relate to decisions of government have to be made public.

It is said that the principle of ministerial responsibility, by which ministers are answerable for their departments to Parliament, is a bar to openness. This is fatuous nonsense. No minister can possibly know more than a small fraction of what goes on in the enormous departments of government today where the state has intervened so massively into every aspect of our lives.

Furthermore, under the system which prevails in Parliament, a minister is always protected by the majority vote of his party when an issue comes to a Parliamentary decision. In every case that I know of, where any attempt

has been made to have a minister reveal facts in his possession and he has refused to do so, he was always sustained by his party.

Then it is argued that a judge or an independent tribunal are not competent to make the final decision as to whether governments must reveal documents. A recent working paper by the Federal Law Reform Commission challenges this attitude, and indicates that the Federal Court has, in fact, set aside decisions by ministers as well as those of federal agencies.

I have figures which show that at one time, in the Department of Justice in the United States, 55,000 people had the right to put the confidential stamp on a document and 18,000 had the right to put secret on a document and 3,000 the right to put top secret. Now, if thousands of people like this from the very narrow position they occupy are vested with the authority to classify documents as being confidential, surely a judge whose training and competence and independence are beyond denial should have an equal right to make a decision as to whether or not a document should be made public.

Governments must be prepared to be accountable, to act today on the basis that their actions and proposals will be assessed by the public and the parliament tomorrow in the light of the facts upon which they decided to proceed. This is the true basis of democracy and accountability.

To govern is a trust and like every other trust, there must be an accounting for the actions of the trustee. How can this be done if the doors are not opened and the truth not known?

In my opinion, governments, ministers and top civil servants underestimate the capacity of the public at large to be able to make sound judgements.

The question of the uranium cartel is a clear example. The government contends that it had to act as it did, to instigate the cartel and allocate quotas of production and fix prices, in order to maintain and keep viable the uranium-production industry in Canada. If this had been necessary and the facts justified it, the government could have put those facts before the public and asked for parliamentary and public support, and I am sure that it would have been obtained.

Instead, the government chose to instigate a James Bond type operation throughout the world with secret meetings, with hidden agents concealed in the European bureaucracy, with official guarantees of freedom from prosecution. When discovery was made some years later, they were then driven to pass a horrendous and shocking Order-in-Council.

What we see going on between the years 1972-75, is, on the one hand, a government in Ottawa apparently committed to strong competition legislation, including amendments to the restrictive trade practices laws. And, on the other hand, engaged in a secret and illegal conspiracy to operate the uranium cartel. Surely no government was ever caught in such a mess of hypocrisy and duplicity. It is no wonder that they were anxious to hide what they were doing. "What a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive."

In a similar way, this same sort of criticism can be levelled at the authorities in connection with the activities of the security forces. We have been told that the breakin at Montreal was absolutely necessary because the authorities were searching for some evidence of a plot advocating violence, apprehended insurrection, hijacking of planes and the seizure of prominent personalities.

Now, if this was so, it was a very dangerous situation. Certainly, the law enforcement agencies would have received public support for making all reasonable efforts to prevent such action. So, if anything had been uncovered or if there had been any facts to justify the actual break-in (even without a search warrant) illegal though it was, if the government and the Prime Minister had made public the reasons upon which they acted, I'm sure that while there would have been some criticism, their actions would have been ultimately condoned.

But, in fact, we have never been given any statements at all to support the allegations of apprehended violence and have been treated to a childish display of irresponsibility and deception. We were first told that there was no break-in at all. Later on, when evidence was available, we were told sheepishly that there were improper activities. The people at the top, who should have known about it, have stoutly maintained their complete ignorance until a short time ago.

It is well known that Prime Minister Trudeau and his then Solicitor-General, Mr. Goyer, were and are paranoid about Quebec and violence in that province. No one will ever convince me that senior police officials of the federal, provincial, and municipal forces, engaging in an operation of this kind, would not have reported to the top officers in their respective forces and that, in turn, these would not have reported through the Solicitor-General or directly to the Prime Minister. When these gentlemen stated in Parliament that they had not been informed, I simply didn't and don't believe them.

All this is an illustration of the stupid, unnecessary, childish deception which has brought the public of Canada to the position where they disbelieve and distrust the government and distrust politicians.

It is good clean fun for people in public life, and others, to bang the media around, and there have been times and circumstances when, like the rest of us, they've made errors, but in relation to the campaign for open government I have received support from all the media elements. It may be self-interest but it is enlightened self-interest.

The Canadian Community Newspapers Association and the Radio Television News Directors' Association have all been active in stories, editorials and public affairs programs, vigorously promoting the cause of open government, because they recognize that it is an assault on reality in this age of communications to deny facts to those most entitled to receive them.

Now, where do we go from here? Either we accept the inevitability of a continuation of a sort of Prime Ministerial dictatorship which could, in turn, be followed by some drastic reaction which might well be accompanied by violence, or we can build on what we have. Change it, better it. For me, the last is the only way to follow and I urge all who feel the same way to give their support to the kind of proposals I have been making.

I know that the road will be long and difficult and that there are rivers to cross and mountains to climb--but, we have the knowledge and the tools to do these things.

All we lack is the will! This, we must find!

The appreciation of the audience was expressed by Mr. H. N. R. Jackman, a Past President of The Empire Club of Canada.