National Archives and Heads of State | Do we have a sense of history?

André Duchesne’s articles on archives in Quebec, Canada and the United States⁠1 allow us to grasp some of the differences between the legislation on national archives in these three States.

Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.

Anne-Marie Gingras

Anne-Marie Gingras
Professor in political science at the University of Quebec in Montreal

The seizure of the documents at Mar-a-Lago brought to light one of the key features of the American legislation, which we would do well to learn from: the obligation for American presidents to turn over all government documents to the archives, and some of these documents become accessible after a certain period of time. Government documents are therefore “public” and not private, in the sense that the president cannot decide alone whether they will be deposited in the archives or when they will be accessible to the public.

In Ottawa, although prime ministers donate their documents to Library and Archives Canada after their last mandate, this “gift” is private, and therefore subject to the goodwill of the donors as to their accessibility. Thus, certain political documents from the 1980s and 1990s are still inaccessible, without being frankly of any interest for national security or negotiations between governments.

We are stunned by the fact that documents such as transcripts of press conferences and press releases from the Brian Mulroney years, at the time public, are considered so secret that they cannot be accessible to researchers today. .

In other words, in Canada, prime ministers’ documents are not considered “public” in the sense of “belonging to the state”. Thus, former prime ministers can block historical research as they see fit, as if the documents produced by officials were their own. Even documents written by officials of the Privy Council Office are not automatically transferred to the archives or made public years later.

It is all the same a shame that, in a parliamentary system, the head of government can behave in a more presidential manner than the President of the United States by refusing to make accessible, decades later, documents which would make it possible to better understand meaning of government decisions.

Library and Archives Canada is not a repository where former prime ministers can deposit their political and personal documents without collaborating with archivists and without agreeing to make “their” boxes of documents accessible. A thorough review of the Library and Archives Canada Act is needed to stop ex-prime ministers behaving in an ultra-presidential way.


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