Parliamentary Secrecy Dipped in May Thanks to Finance Hearings
The Sixth Estate Open Government project tracks, among other things, the extent to which Parliamentary committee meetings occur in camera, meaning in secret. I began tracking this after there was substantial media criticism of the Conservatives for increasing the number of meetings held in camera, followed by a politically useful CP report based on a demonstrably wrong analysis purporting to show that Martin and Chretien actually presided over more secretive Parliaments than Harper has. I took CP to task, and the article has subsequently been pulled from most online media outlets and stuffed down the memory hole.
Today I’ve finished computing the committee secrecy figures for May. Last month committees met for a total of 79 hours in secret, which was 22.3% of their total meeting time. That’s down from 25.5% the previous month. I wouldn’t get too excited about a Parliamentary Spring, however. The main difference was the series of public hearings held by the Finance Committee following the introduction of the budget. If you take out the Finance Committee’s numbers, then the amount of time spent in secret meetings during both of the last two months would have been 25%.
Either way, after the opposition began to threaten resistance to growing secrecy over the winter and early spring, Parliamentary secrecy seems to have reached a new plateau level that is just a few percent higher than in previous governments:
Nathan
I have to wonder if with the right analysis the average of 25.5% would look like small potatoes. It’s not as though committees have the same workload every day of every week of every month, and in terms of governmental secrecy it would be saying something what the % was during certain key times. As well as insubstantial to note that it dips considerably when there is no relevant federal agenda at hand that needs to be kept secret. It’s like coming up with a statistic of the likelihood of a fire during dry season rather than an average based on the entire year, discounting the rare day that it rained, and taking extra precaution to make extra measurements during and specific to periods are of special note to give an adjusted likelihood.
Sixth Estate
Nathan — Yes, there are a range of factors involved. The only relevant statistic my own spreadsheet tracks is the total amount of committee work: in general, committees are meeting less overall but more of the time they do meet is in secret.
Any deeper analysis would have interesting results, but only in the hands of someone who was being paid for the vast amount of time it would require to put it together.
In general, all report drafting is done in secret, a lot of agenda-setting is done in secret, and the most public aspect of committee activity is hearing testimony. That’s the part that’s come under criticism for more secretiveness on the part of the Conservatives. Debating draft reports is a less cumbersome and time-consuming procedure when the government holds a majority on the committee and can simply ram its agenda through.