“The prime minister’s office is a sick institution and we have to heal it,” the Liberal MP told iPolitics. “It is contagious for the entire government system.”
Dion likened the secret OICs to omnibus bills — another legal procedure which he said has been abused by the Harper government.
“A practice that is exceptional has become common practice under the Conservatives and it is very worrying. When we become the government we will go back to being an open government and we adjust to the new requirements of Canadians on that subject.
“It will be reviewed and it will be up to the government to justify why it wants to hide information instead of the other way around.”
While he said a Liberal government would overhaul Canada’s access to information law — applying it to the prime minister’s office and ministers’ offices — Dion would not say what the Liberals would do about the 25 secret or unpublished orders-in-council that iPolitics discovered have been adopted by the Conservatives.
“Our priority will be the future. Our government will be open and accessible to Canadians.”
The NDP has pledged to review the orders-in-council and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said she wants to see measures introduced by the next Parliament to provide for more oversight of secret OICs.
Dion’s comments come after a review by iPolitics of nearly 32,000 OICs adopted between 1999 and 2015 revealed that the Harper government has adopted 25 secret, or unpublished, orders-in-council that have been hidden from Parliament and Canadians.
Since last September alone, there have been eight secret OICs.
By comparison, the previous Liberal government adopted only three secret OICs in the seven years between 1999 and 2005 — two of them in 2004 and one in 2005. Between 1999 and 2003, there were no unpublished OICs — although some, in 1999, contained only bare-bones information such as the number, the date and the sponsoring minister (in most cases former Solicitor General Lawrence MacAulay).
Dion, who served as environment minister during the period when the Liberals adopted three unpublished OICs, said he does not remember them or know what they were about.
However, he also noted that the review by iPolitics didn’t find any unpublished OICs in 2001 — the year of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre.
While some have pointed out that all governments sometimes have to make decisions that must be kept secret, Dion said Canadians should be concerned about the growth in the number of unpublished orders-in-council.
“It’s a problem when it grows like that all of a sudden. It adds to the sentiment that we have a hyper-secretive government that hides everything. And since we know that they manipulate things, as we saw in the Duffy affair, how many other things have they manipulated for their partisan interest rather than for the public interest?”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Elizabeth Thompson
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