The Sixth Estate

MPs are back at work and, under the Harper regime, that means that they are once again spending a considerable portion of their “public” time actually meeting behind closed doors, away from the sinister prying eyes of the public and of journalists. The CBC’s venerable Kady drew attention to this last week in the context of a moderately evil decision by Conservatives on the Procedure and House Affairs Committee to close the curtain of secrecy on discussion of a motion to limit omnibus bills. You will recall that the position of the present Prime Minister is that omnibus bills are “a contradiction to the conventions and practices” of Canadian democracy. Unless, of course, he’s the one introducing them, as he did this spring, in which case they are a vital and necessary step in fulfilling the mandate of Canada’s strong majority government.

Anyhow, the committees started up again this September, and, using the minutes on the official committee website, it is possible to see that they spent a total of 34 hours in meetings that month. (The number is very low because only a few planning meetings have been held so far; committees will be much busier over the next couple months.) Out of that total, they spent 55% of their time meeting in secret, or about 19 hours.

This proportion is disturbingly high, but it’s in keeping with the practice of the Harper regime as a majority. Last September, committees spent 54% of their time meeting in secret. I’ll have an update comparing this with previous governments in a few days.

The Sixth Estate Open Government Project exists to track various measures of government secrecy.

After an appallingly inaccurate CP report on Parliamentary secrecy a couple of montsh ago, Sixth Estate began tracking the amount of time that Parliamentary committees spend in camera, meaning in secret, under the Harper regime. The Open Government Project page shows that Harper’s Parliament allows committees to meet in secret significantly more often than they did under the Liberals — over the past year, around 26% of committee meeting time was behind closed doors.

June saw a significant spike in time spent in secret, up to 47% of all committee meeting time. In part this was a regular function of Parliamentary procedure: many committees are finishing up reports now, and report drafting is one phase which is traditionally conducted in secret. Here’s how Parliamentary secrecy stacks up over the (so far) 14 months of Harper majority government:

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A couple weeks after CP spread a nasty and false rumour that Chretien and Martin ran Parliament far more secretively than Stephen Harper does, electronic versions of its hit piece have become rare as hen’s teeth. Some are still out there, but CP’s retraction, prompted by fact-checking by exactly two journalists across the dozens of papers which gleefully printed the story (Kady of CBC, and myself), means most have vanished down the memory hole. Sun Media’s gleeful pro-Conservative editorial has vanished without a trace, too. True to form, Sun didn’t bother with a retraction. Now you’re just greeted with a warning that “there’s something wrong” with the page, which was true all along.

So far in my own Open Government study, I have shown that the time Parliamentary committees met in secret, away from the public, rose from 22.5% under Martin to over 25% under Harper. CP’s misleading numbers on those two Parliaments involved concocting a seemingly made-up “joint committee” on national security, plus including hours Senate committees spent in secret under Martin but not under Harper. I also pointed out that the Public Accounts Committee met on average 21.8% of the time under the Liberals, but 32.1% under Harper.

I’ve now finished calculating two more Parliaments’ worth of data: the brief fall 2008 session which ended in surprise prorogation, and then the one in 2010-2011 which ended with the downfall of the government over allegations that it was lying about the cost of the F-35 jet fighter. Which, as recent events have shown, it was. Here’s how it all stacks up so far:

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My study of Parliamentary secrecy, rejuvenated by CP’s bogus numbers claiming to prove that the Martin majority was much more secretive than the Harper majority, continues. Unlike the House as a whole, committees regularly go in camera, meaning no observers may be present, and no detailed records of testimony or debates are published. As I recently showed, on the whole, House committees have spent over 25% of their time in secret over the past year, compared with 22.5% under Martin — not a tremendously large change.

Some committees, however, have undergone a much more dramatic change. The Public Accounts Committee, for instance, which hears such controversial subjects as the Auditor-General’s reports to Parliament, met in camera for a total of 116 hours under the Liberals between 1997 (the earliest date that proper online minutes are available) and 2005; in contrast, since 2006, it has amassed 148 hours in secret.

And as you can see, there is a distinct upward trend in secrecy, at least at this particular committee. The following chart shows the percentage of time it spent meeting in camera in Parliamentary sessions since 1997:

As promised, I am conducting a fact-checking inquiry into the recent news report alleging, contrary to routine media reports of growing secrecy under the Harper government, that actually Martin’s brief majority in 2004 was far more secretive, averaging 116 minutes a day of hidden in camera committee meetings.

I am now in a position to call upon the Canadian Press and the Library of Parliament to make available whatever analysis report is the basis of their numbers on this issue. Shortly I will be examining the other sessions referenced, but the easiest one to start with is the Martin government, because it was so short. So far as I am aware, the only way for public citizens to do this kind of research is to go to the Parliamentary committee minutes and count up all the time spent in camera, which is duly recorded there down to the minute.

The results are intriguing.

According to the CP report, 36 hours of secret testimony — or an average of about 20 minutes a day over the entire session — was heard by one single committee: the “joint parliamentary committee on national security.” This committee, as I have stated before, did not exist. Not by that name and not, at least within the jurisdiction of Parliament, by any other name either.

Next, the total given by the CP report actually includes both Senate and House of Commons committees. This is why my own numbers were so dramatically different from theirs, prompting my dissenting report on Monday. 52 of the 182 hours of in camera meetings took place in the Senate. Once these are subtracted, we fall back to about 70 minutes per day of actual in camera discussion inside the House of Commons. That’s about 22.5% of all Parliamentary committee time.

If we want to talk about total time including Senate committee time, that’s fine, but we should be clear about what we’re talking about. To date, the talk about Parliamentary secrecy has not included discussion of Senate committees, just Commons committees. Juicing the statistics by adding in Senate time isn’t necessarily illegitimate, but people do have a right to be informed that that’s what you’re doing.

My next task will be to add up time in the current Parliament. Pins and needles! In the meantime, you can check my math here, if you want to.

As they say, there are three kinds of statistics — and two of them are lies.

On Sunday, a strange and surprising report began making the rounds of the Canadian professional media thanks to Canadian Press: a claim that, contrary to the protests of the Official Opposition, the Harper regime is actually less secretive than its majority government predecessors, under Paul Martin and Jean Chretien. It’s not impossible, of course. But there’s enough red flags in this report that I’m going to have to reserve judgement.

It so happens that following a story which reached a different conclusion a couple weeks ago, I started compiling my own spreadsheet of Parliamentary committee in camera statistics. I immediately went to that spreadsheet yesterday after reading that story, and my numbers were so at odds with the CP report that I figured one of us — probably me — had to be wrong. So I’ve decided I’d better recheck my math — even if it means a long couple days’ worth of work (and it will). Which, in the meantime, has meant that in announcing my suspicions I’ve been scooped by the Venerable Kady. Not that I’m bitter.

I want to emphasize this: maybe my work’s wrong. It’s hard to imagine being as wrong as some of the figures would suggest, but I’m loathe to go on record with the only other logical conclusion without double-checking. But in the meantime, please note that I do not have confidence in the CP report, and that I will have more to say on this later in the week.

In the meantime you need to know the only statistic that for some reason CP didn’t bother to share: the percentage of committee time spent in secret. That’s because committees can meet for more time, and therefore more often in secret, without actually pushing an unusual amount of work behind the veil of the in camera rules. A couple weeks ago iPolitics suggested that the 2002-2003 Chretien session, which came second on the CP list, was more secret than Harper’s recent session. That’s possible; I haven’t checked those figures yet. But according to my spreadsheet, Harper’s committees have spent 25.1% of their time in secret since the last election; Martin’s committees, again according to my spreadsheet-in-progress, spent 22% of their time in secret.

More seriously, the CP says that under Martin, the most secret commitee was the “joint parliamentary committee on national security, which spent more than 36 hours in secret deliberations.”

This is the claim which has made me go public even with only tentative figures, because it threw me for a loop, just as it threw Kady for a loop. There is no such committee listed in the minutes for 2004. To my knowledge there has never been such a committee. There was a non-Parliamentary committee on this subject in 2004, with a different name than the one given here, and Kady thinks that’s what they’re referring to maybe. But they didn’t start hearing witnesses until after this session ended, according to their report. And the main thing is, they’re not a standing committee of the House; they’re a special committee created by the Minister of Public Safety outside of Parliament. So they don’t count.

What’s really interesting is that, since they’re using the (alleged) hours from a non-Parliamentary committee, CP’s source for this information can’t have been the Parliamentary minutes. Consequently, we need to know what data source they are using. Now.

Under policy set by the Chretien government and supposedly faithfully followed by all departments and agencies under the Harper regime, every group within the Government of Canada must supply, every three months, a list of contracts over $10,000, a list of grants and contributions over $25,000, and a list of travel and hospitality expenses by the minister and senior staff. They come out on the last day of the month, and they are staggered, so that every month, one of the lists gets published.

These lists are important for a variety of reasons. They let the media check up on which jet-setting ministers are expensing the largest number of flights, five-star hotels, and $16 glasses of orange juice to the public purse. They let Sixth Estate produce the Pork Barrel report — which tracks whether groups in Conservative ridings or specific regions (like Quebec) receive a disproportionate amount of federal money.

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