Politicians won’t suffer for acting like asses. But when they are braying to keep information from Parliament, and thereby the Canadian people, people really…
The government came up with a very weird sub-minimum-wage summer jobs program to help young Canadians weather the COVID storm, farmed it out to cronies, and then it all exploded into a thousand pieces. Trudeau apologized for not recusing himself, in light of appearance fees paid for WE events to his brother and mother; Morneau apologized for not recusing himself, in light of his daughter working for WE , and vanished in a puff of smoke.
It would almost be better if they were covering something up. It’s certainly conceivable that they are. But as MacDougall says, it’s equally conceivable they’re just doing this for sport. They’re doing it because this is what committees in Ottawa do. We’re the government, we own this information, and you can’t have it. And nobody besides the opposition parties really cares.
But when the asses are braying to keep information from Parliament, and thereby the Canadian people, people really should care. Canadian officialdom guards information as a matter of principle: it is closed by default, no matter how benign the information in principle is. It is immensely frustrating and undemocratic, not to mention costly. But it is also obviously means that any non-benign information will be guarded even more zealously.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Non-journalist Canadians are often incredulous when you tell them how much more forthcoming American officialdom is with harmless information, but it’s night and day. Communications officers in the U.S. government generally exist to communicate with the public, not to intermediate between grown-adult journalists and grown-adult civil servants and politicians who are perfectly capable of calling each other’s telephones. We could do that too, if we wanted.
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