What do our governments have to hide? They have never spent so much of your money, whether on salaries, public contracts and subsidies of all kinds. And yet, they seem to be less and less transparent.
The newspaper, as you know, constantly defends the public interest. Our journalists are increasing requests for access to information to allow you to be more informed citizens and taxpayers.
As part of the file that we are presenting to you starting today, we asked these information professionals to testify about the worst horror stories they have experienced in connection with access to information .
Disturbing cases
I’ve been leading investigative journalism for over a decade, and I thought I’d seen it all when it came to lack of transparency. However, I was stunned when reading the cases provided by colleagues:
In Ottawa, access to information is a farce. Talk to my colleague Sarah-Maude Lefebvre, journalist at the Bureau of Investigation. She had time to have two children, the eldest of whom is now 6 years old, before receiving a response to a request made in 2017 to the RCMP.
The government of Quebec doesn’t do much better. Impossible to have an interview about access to information with Jean-François Roberge. Transparency is so serious for the CAQ that the government is on its fourth minister responsible for this issue since coming to power just over 5 years ago.
In the two largest budget items that fall under the National Assembly, namely health and education, the mess is complete. More than a third of the 72 school service centers simply did not respond to our journalist Daphnée Dion-Viens, who wanted figures on teachers who resign.
At the municipal, access to information is often a matter of improvisation. Is it any surprise that the general manager of a village refuses to be transparent when he has to answer about his own expenses?
Without speaking police forceswho act “often as if the law of access to information did not exist”, according to a criminology professor who spoke to us.
Other cases
• Read also: Radio-Canada hides the fees of its speakers Rebecca Makonnen, Alec Castonguay and France Beaudoin
• Read also: The police hide a recording of her child from her
Don’t miss all the testimonies in our article this Saturday.
Empty promises
However, there has been no shortage of major commitments in terms of transparency.
From the liberal government of Philippe Couillard, which promised in 2014 to be “the most transparent in history”, to François Legault, who proclaimed loud and clear during the pandemic that “there is absolutely nothing “hidden” and that “everything is transparent”…
In Quebec, the law is very clear:
“Any person who requests it has the right of access to the documents of a public body.”
And this doesn’t just apply to the media. “We tend to think that the law on access to information is a journalistic nonsense, but that is not true. The vast majority of requests are made by citizens or organizations,” insists Éric-Pierre Champagne, president of the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec (FPJQ).
- Listen to the interview with Jean Louis Fortin, director of the Quebecor Investigation Bureau on the microphone by Alexandre Dubé via
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We must demand better
There are many valid exceptions to deny access to information. For example, a secret that would compromise the safety of a police informer. Or even a government negotiation strategy for its collective agreements. Or even information that falls within the private sphere.
But too often, public bodies lazily use one of these pretexts to justify a total rejection, rather than transmitting a document having taken care to hide only what deserved to be hidden.
Without the access to information requests, no one would have known last November the extent of the questionable expenses at the Office de consultation publique de Montréal. Our journalistic investigations caused the National Assembly to change the law to subject this type of organization to greater control. The City of Montreal has also reviewed its spending policy, even if its general director claims to have started working on this reform before our revelations.
There is no doubt; When it comes to transparency, Quebecers can and must demand better from their governments.
Count on The newspaper to fight this battle.
— Jean-Louis Fortin, director of the Bureau of Investigation