What’s the big secret?

 
 
APRIL 17, 2012
 
 
The blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation that followed a simple question about snow from Citizen reporter Tom Spears to the National Research Council last month is a symptom of a serious problem that deserves more public attention.
Spears wanted to know about a joint study conducted by the NRC and NASA on falling snow. In a story, Spears carefully itemizes how many staffers it took (11) to answer the request with an inadequate response that eventually arrived by email. He was able to follow the Byzantine course his request took through the bureaucracy with the help of illuminating documents obtained through access to information.
“NASA, meanwhile, answered everything in one phone call,” he notes. “It took about 15 minutes.”
What makes this news is not that it was an unusual experience. Spears’ tale is so common that it has become almost a kind of parlour game with reporters to top each other’s stories about how long it takes and how little useful comes from trying to get information from the federal government. Stories about the ease with which information flows south of the Canada/U.S. border are equally common. But the difficulty of wrestling information from our government is much more than a mere irritant for journalists.
Not only does a culture of extreme information control and secrecy in the federal and other levels of government not help the public — what public good could be served, for example, by controlling and massaging information about how falling snow is measured by government scientists? — but it does damage as well.
Controlling and, effectively, hiding information about what the government is doing is a recipe for abuse. How can Canadians judge whether their tax dollars are being put to good use? And how can they benefit from the research being done on their behalf?
At a time when the public sector workforce is being cut by as much as 10 per cent in some cases, it is highly relevant to ask how the work being done by the public service serves taxpayers.
Spears’ example suggests increasing manpower is being devoted to keeping information from Canadians at the very time some who provide vital services — such as meat inspectors, for example — are losing their jobs.
In the end, Spears got so little useful information — a day late — from the NRC, that his newspaper story mentioned the research council’s involvement only “ ... as a courtesy. NASA has talked with enthusiasm about the job of studying snow and its mysteries. NRC has sent an email describing the number of pieces of equipment on an airplane.”
It is a sad statement on the warped culture of information control when we have to turn to the Americans to learn about snow.
Ottawa Citizen
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