The Sixth Estate

Canada’s most inept international aid minister ever, Julian Fantino, published two extraordinary partisan screeds on his agency’s website recently which have caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the news. As a result, they’ve been pulled from the government’s website. Nice try, Mr. Fantino. Documents don’t die easily on the Web. For the sake of my readers and your constituents, I’ve re-published the letters below.

Just so we’re clear, using taxpayer-funded government department websites for partisan purposes isn’t just unethical, it’s against the rules. It’s an explicitly prohibited misuse of taxpayer resources. This is an official policy statement from a government department; as a result, it is not permitted to include partisan affairs of any sort.

The current news from the government is that the letters were “posted in error.” It’s hard to imagine how that could be the case. As you can see by comparing the texts below with versions that were published in more appropriate non-taxpayer-financed forums, namely the National Post and the Huffington Post, someone specifically went in and edited the versions that went up on CIDA’s website to add extra links. Someone also formatted the text, sent it to the webmaster’s office, and authorized its publication.

Things like this don’t happen by “accident” in government. There’s probably even a paper trail, like there was for Jason Kenney’s fake citizenship ceremony last year. Even at Sixth Estate, sometimes I regret things I publish, but I certainly don’t just “accidentally” write, edit, and publish entire columns.

Here’s the first one, written to the NDP. Notice that in the final paragraph Julian Fantino singles out Canada’s aid program in Haiti as a particularly successful one, worthy of attention. A few days ago, Fantino announced that he was not satisfied with the Haiti program and that Canada should eliminate its aid to that country. How you want to square these remarks is up to you.

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Several important institutions were put on the chopping block in Budget 2012, and some of those had important catalogues of publications on topics of national importance which I am concerned will vanish down the memory hole, as George Orwell once put it, in the coming months, as their respective organizations wind down operations and vanish into history.

This week’s victim was the National Council of Welfare. It’s not surprising if you’ve never heard much of this agency before this year. Think tanks set up by and for some large corporations, like the Conference Board of Canada or the C.D. Howe Institute, have no difficulty getting attention from the media published by other large corporations, like the Globe & Mail and the National Post. A think tank devoted to studying poverty and welfare, by contrast, is likely to toil in obscurity, much like the people it’s intended to advocate for.

Today, Sixth Estate is pleased to announce that I am making available online the backlog of Council publications which were formally accessible via its website, dating back to the 1970s. Some of these are already listed at Publications.gc.ca; the rest, I would hate to let disappear into the ether simply because of the callousness and capriciousness of the government in power. Links go to documents which were published under Crown copyright; I am not making them available for commercial purposes, and as I understand the relevant law, you may not do so either. Not that you were thinking of doing so. These reports are a legacy to a goal our government apparently feels is no longer worth pursuing: the eradication of poverty.

The Council was a creation of the Tories, by which I mean the Progressive Conservative Party that, sadly, no longer exists in federal politics. It was created by Diefenbaker in 1969, spun out into quasi-NGO status by Trudeau, and has been producing reports and publishing statistics ever since then. The Council website was located at http://www.ncw.gc.ca/.

Interestingly, since (and including) the mid-Trudeau era, only the Chretien government managed to achieve a lasting decrease in poverty across Canada:

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This week’s Sixth Estate Document Collection update is a record of futile and abandoned promises: the major political parties’ election platforms of the past ten years. Election platforms are not, or at least not always, a summary of the actual political beliefs of a political party’s leadership. Instead, they’re a statement that those leaders think their chosen target audience will find appealing. They’re marketing documents. And much like when you rush out and buy cheap gimmicks because they’re on sale, there’s often a let-down when you realize you’ve been sold a bill of goods by slick salesmen. We can and must demand better from our political parties.

However, historically speaking, it’s also useful to look at election platforms precisely because of what the above implies: a vision that, at that point in time, each party thought was the best compromise between what it knew its respective base was expecting, and what it thought other Canadians could be convinced to vote for. Pundits often refer to this, quite misleadingly, as a political party’s “move to the centre” — i.e. move to a place from which they can appeal to more voters. Has that “centre” changed? Looking at old election platforms can tell us.

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Commissioner Frank Iacobucci

For some reason, the Harper Government™’s policy is to take down websites of royal commissions a while after they’ve reported their findings. It’s not all bad news — the final reports then get stored on a server at Library and Archives Canada. But it’s bad news if you’re trying to find a report. Try and find the Iacobucci Report, the secretive counterpart to the Arar Commission (and looking at several other innocent Canadians caught up in the American counterterrorist fishing net to be tortured by Middle Eastern dictatorships). I’ll wait while you do. Or the complete reports of the Arar Commission, for that matter.

I’m going to make some links available here as a public service. There are several reasons for this, which is why I will have to preface this with some remarks. First, I have to wonder whether the government is being entirely up-front about which commissions get “archived” and which don’t. The Air India Commission (2006) website is gone. The Oliphant Commission is still up, but will disappear in June. So is the Gomery Commission (2005), whose website has expired but redirects to its LAC archive. That’s the commission that embarrassed the Liberals, you recall. But the Iacobucci Commission (2006) and the Arar Commission, which investigated the government’s attack on Canadians’ human rights, are long gone. The former website of the Arar Commission is now a website for a loans company.

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I am somewhat disturbed by the apparent decision of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to remove from its website all annual reports prior to 2000. You can see the effects of this memory hole exercise here. CSIS has of course been around since 1984, and been issuing declassified versions of its annual reports since 1991. Given the tiny size of these reports, I can see no reasonable explanation for why they are no longer available online.

Finding the right balance between national security and public rights is a difficult task in a democracy, and intelligence services sit right in the centre of that debate. The public reports are pretty bland and nondescript fare, for the most part. So are the annual reports of its supposed watchdog, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which, as I have noted before, is pretty much toothless (and bark-less) due to a lack of any real authority combined with a lack of credible experience. In any case, I am now linking to all of the old CSIS reports at the Documents page, as a public service, since CSIS apparently no longer wishes to do so. Here’s a summary of the interesting material:

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More WikiLeaks cables are now up, and I’ve nearly completed listing the Canadian cables now. The new selections feature reflections on English-speaking Conservative politicians resenting the promotion of their less numerous and supposedly less qualified Quebec colleagues, the embassy’s thoughts on free trade and deep integration, Canada’s plans to replace its “combat” force in Afghanistan with an exceptionally large “training” force (which apparently was being considered as early as 2009, when the government publicly was still saying the mission would be over by 2011), the Conservative government’s decision to abandon climate change reforms, and the documents which suggest that Canadian intelligence agencies are still routinely sharing data on Canadian citizens with their American counterparts, the sort of thing which should have stopped after the abduction and torture of Maher Arar and other citizens in 2002.

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Maybe it’s just Bell, but it seems to me that the WikiLeaks website has been having some trouble with bad connections lately — probably as a result of its new Guantanamo leaks. Moreover, although the latest relevant leaks continue to receive some play in the media, Canadian sites like CBC appear to have stopped updating their databases of relevant cables as they’re released. (They’ve done this just as they begin releasing several series of documents that have not yet been released to the general public, which particularly irks me.) For this reason, Sixth Estate is going to maintain a list of documents relevant to Canadian politics and foreign affairs at the Sixth Estate Watchlist. Note: this is not a mirror of WikiLeaks. It is a collection of documents specifically related to Canada, not a duplication of the entire WikiLeaks archive. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll still need to go to WikiLeaks.

Soon, I’ll expand the Watchlist database to include the rest of what WikiLeaks has released from the cable archive, as well as a number of other important sets of documents which are increasingly difficult to find online. For the moment, however, you can find links to around half of the WikiLeaks documents from Canada, sorted by subject area. As anyone who has worked in diplomatic history will not be surprised to learn, the vast majority of the documents are unclassified summaries of public news. The documents I thought seemed more interesting and, um, newsworthy are the ones that have been bolded. Also,

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