Canada’s Department of National Defence taking three years to respond to a researcher’s information access request has earned it the Canadian Association of Journalists’ 2023 federal Code of Silence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy.
The researcher had asked for information about the cost of a controversial program to build new Canadian warships.
The association said Parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux has estimated the cost to taxpayers of the ship-building contract, which would see 15 new warships built for the Royal Canadian Navy, to be about $84 billion.
According to data cited in a January 2024 Ottawa Citizen story, the project is behind schedule and seeing huge cost overruns.
“Even though this project is still stuck in the dry dock of the Irving Shipyards, it feels like a project that’s already sunk in terms of accountability and transparency,” association president Brent Jolly said.
“Misleading journalists and returning 1,700 pages of censored documents to a researcher asking a simple question is both Kafkaesque and indefensible, “he said. “It shows a galling level of disrespect for the intelligence of Canadians and their right to know how their tax dollars are being spent.”
The Citizen’s story said officials with Public Services and Procurement Canada issued a directive that firms interested in maintenance work on the warship program could not talk to journalists.
Instead, they were told to refer all inquiries to the department. “This directive was altered after the Citizen began reporting on the so-called ‘gag order,’” the association said.
Federal cabinet dishonourable mention
This year’s jury also bestowed a dishonourable mention to the federal Cabinet Office for its efforts, in partnership with the Australian government, to secretly undermine the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2003.
According to a report from Britain’s Guardian newspaper, cabinet records showed that the Australian government sought to water down the declaration’s language from “self-determination” to “self-management.” Amendments, similarly, were being pursued without Indigenous consultation.
“It is an international embarrassment that Canadians must turn to the documents kept by other countries to understand how decisions were made by our national government on critical files such as those involving Indigenous Peoples,” Jolly said.
He said Canada’s abandonment of proactive cabinet records disclosure in the 1980s “it, in one fell swoop, took us back to the Stone Age in terms of transparency. It was an ill-conceived decision then and one that continues to undermine our collective right to know every single day.”
The Code of Silence Awards are presented annually by the association, the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
The awards call public attention to government or publicly funded agencies that work hard to hide information to which the public has a right to under access to information legislation.
The remaining 2023 Code of Silence Awards will be handed out bi-weekly. This year’s winner in the provincial category will be announced on May 22.
