Sometimes you write to me and suggest that I get hold of this or that document through access to information laws. This mechanism sometimes gives good results, but very often it leads to little.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
The media have certain tools, but there are many ways for public bodies to circumvent them.
I am telling you about this because I am emerging from a long and laborious exercise of requesting access to information, which bears witness to the obstacles and limits that come with these laws.
Following two chronicles on the future of the Silo noh 5, last November and December, I asked my colleague William Leclerc, responsible for making these requests to public bodies in The Pressto obtain all written communications regarding this file between the Canada Lands Company (SIC) and the developer Devimco, as well as between the City of Montreal and SIC, from February 2019 to December 2021.
On December 8, William (whose patience and perseverance I salute) wrote to me to tell me that my “requests are in the machine”.
A few days later, the Clerk’s Office of the City of Montreal told us that since our request pertains to documents held by the Sud-Ouest borough, the request will be forwarded to that location.
But the next day, we are told that it is rather the borough of Ville-Marie which holds these documents. Our request is therefore redirected.
A week later, the borough of Ville-Marie told us that it was not responsible for this file and that the Clerk’s Office of the City of Montreal would be “pleased to respond to our request” by l through its Urban Planning Department.
So here we are set after this little trip to the land of bureaucracy.
However, my colleague William Leclerc informs those concerned of his astonishment to see that none of these boroughs hold documents relating to the Pointe-du-Moulin revitalization project. Months pass and, on March 10, when we are beginning to get impatient, we are told that we have finally found 194 pages of emails.
I went through these many exchanges over the weekend. Unsurprisingly, they contain nothing worthwhile. Through dozens and dozens of emails, we try to organize meetings or visits to the Pointe-du-Moulin site with representatives of the City and the SIC.
From January to September 2020, the drafting of a statement of the heritage interest of Pointe-du-Moulin brings together a dozen employees of the City and the SIC and generates an impressive amount of comments on certain aspects of the text.
Will you be surprised if I tell you that the vast majority of comments from CLC (Old Port of Montreal) management regarding this statement have been redacted?
In short, we meet, we discuss, we visit and brainstorm, but none of this is the subject of written conclusions or reflections.
For its part, the Canada Lands Company, owner of the site, settled our request in two stages, three movements. In an email sent on March 17, nearly three months after our request, we were informed that they had identified 3,216 pages related to our subject.
But “given that disclosure of the documents could reasonably be expected to cause material harm to the financial interests of Canada Lands Company with respect to a future sale of the property, [la SIC a] decided not to disclose the requested information”.
In fact, the law provides that an organization may refuse to communicate information when it could harm negotiations or economic interests. We can therefore conclude that the CLC is currently conducting negotiations and that the 3216 pages of documents identified relate to this.
In short, for the SIC, nothing of what it has is transmissible to the public and nothing can help the citizens to understand what we want to do with the Silo noh 5 (disused since 1994) or why this project has stalled for years.
The limits of access to information laws, both federal and provincial, are regularly pointed out. The cases of excessively redacted documents, as has just happened to a journalist from Radio-Canada (Thomas Gerbet received a copy of the ethical opinion issued on the occasion of the curfew of last December, completely redacted before receiving it in its original version), cause a lot of frustration among journalists. And waste of time.
The Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec (FPJQ) has long wanted an overhaul of the provincial law. But all this remains a dead letter. On March 20, the Minister responsible for Access to Information, Éric Caire, declared that an overhaul of the law was not necessary.
“The problem with access to information is that everything is based on an access to information request. However, today, the global trend is towards open government,” he told a Radio-Canada journalist.
I have nothing else to add!