An error-prone 'transparency'
Pro-actively posted federal documents can badly mislead
The pro-active publication of internal documents by governments has long been touted as a cure-all for a dysfunctional access–to-information regime.
After all, if citizens are requesting the same stuff again and again, why not just release the documents pro-actively without making people jump through the hoops of a formal access-to-information request? Pro-active publication promotes transparency, and reduces the workload of weary access officers. Or so the theory goes.
In reality, pro-active publication is often a dodge, a ruse to avoid the hard work of fixing a broken access-to-information system. The practice in fact allows governments to reclaim sovereignty over information through deciding what is released, how much is released and when it’s released, subtly eroding the rights of citizens to demand information. The practice leans back to those dark days when governments alone chose what to share with citizens.
And as a practical matter, pro-active publication has done nothing to ease the burden of departments processing requests. Workloads are ever-increasing, despite the public posting of many documents.
Pro-active publication can even be a source of misinformation.
A case in point: journalists have had a tough time assessing the value of procurement contracts awarded to GC Strategies, the firm associated with the ArriveCan boondoggle.
Drawing on a government disclosure website, two reporters at La Presse counted $258 million worth of GC Strategies contracts issued between 2015 and 2023. That story made headlines last February.
But there were errors and discrepancies within the posted dataset, and the real number turned out to be $96 million, which La Presse later reported. Other media outlets (CBC, CTV, Radio-Canada) picked up the original La Presse number, and later had to backtrack.
Canada’s procurement ombud, Alexander Jeglic, determined that the so-called Open Government portal, which lists all federal government contracts worth more than $10,000, was a hot mess of errors. In a report this year, Jeglic found inaccurate numbers for 16 of 41 ArriveCan contracts, and missing information for 17 of them.
The Globe and Mail’s Bill Curry avoided the wonky portal altogether, drawing on audited numbers in the Public Accounts of Canada for his award-winning ArriveCan reportage.
The federal government’s pro-active posting regime, widened in December 2003 by the Paul Martin government and again in 2019 by the Justin Trudeau government, has no independent oversight.
The Information Commissioner of Canada, for example, has zero authority to audit the mandatory posting of contracts, briefing notes, travel expenses, etc., to ensure that they are timely, accurate and complete. It’s pretty much an honour system.
So how unreliable is the overall data in the portal? In March this year, Canada’s then-comptroller general Roch Huppe asked departments to review the accuracy of the contract data they had posted to Open Government, the searchable public website. That project is apparently still underway under Huppe’s replacement, Annie Boudreau.
But through the Access to Information Act, I asked for the results of the in-house review by one of those departments, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which currently has an astonishing 24,000 contract records posted on Open Government. The released document is here:
In a sample of about 1,000 such records, the RCMP found that eight per cent contained errors that needed correction. That’s 80 garbled contracts. That rate is enough to make any responsible journalist steer clear of the portal. It also raises doubts about the accuracy of postings by other departments.
The RCMP, however, was not concerned. “The error rate present within the dataset … is considered acceptable given the dataset was expected to have errors and [given] the fluid nature of contracting.”
“The RCMP will correct published data with confirmed issues such as duplicate entries and date anomalies as they become apparent …”
So one large federal department has an eight per cent error rate, and seems none too keen to get it right the first time. How frequently are other big departments posting erroneous contract information?
The next time you see a government minister touting pro-active disclosure as a giant leap for transparency, be sure to count the silverware.