Tories rely on FIPPA’s get-out-of-disclosure card By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/10/2022 (798 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The rule of thumb in high-level politics is that if you don’t have anything to hide, then don’t try to hide anything.

Although it’s a simple enough concept, it’s one that continues to evade those in power, as events from this week demonstrate.

Earlier this week, the Free Press obtained the results of a freedom of information request for correspondence between the premier and her senior staff about the federal government’s decision early this year to invoke the Emergencies Act to quash the “freedom convoy” protest.

In one of the email chains, an email address and response from whomever was using it were redacted. An exchange from another member of the chain strongly suggested it was Stefanson.

The opposition NDP immediately lashed out, accusing Stefanson of using a private email account for government business. A private email would be a serious matter, particularly since the Tories agreed to a policy in 2017 that all government electronic communications would be conducted on government devices and servers, and recorded for posterity.

It turns out, the email account in question is a government account, although one with a confidential address.

Even still, Stefanson seemed to be offside on a serious breach of protocol on an issue that could be politically costly for her Tory government.

We already knew that Stefanson had, what one might call, a “fluid position” on the convoy.

On Feb. 11, in a private letter obtained by the Free Press, Stefanson demanded Prime Minister Justin Trudeau take “immediate and effective” action to remove a trucker blockade at the Emerson border crossing. Several days later at a news conference, however, she publicly criticized Ottawa for using the Emergencies Act.

Those statements revealed a conflict of positions. On one hand, we have the premier quietly urging Ottawa to take whatever steps were necessary to shut down the convoy. On the other, she publicly criticized Ottawa and, by implication, showed a modicum of deference for the libertarian protesters.

In that context, there was a clear and compelling public interest in those conversations for everyone on both sides of what was an issue that remains controversial. Except that, allegedly, someone deep within the bowels of government decided details of that email should not be released to the public.

On Tuesday, Stefanson’s press secretary told the Free Press the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act officer decided to redact based on section 24 (a) of the act, which states that a request for information can be refused “if disclosure could reasonably be expected to threaten or harm the mental or physical health or the safety of another person.”

However, the premier’s office pivoted Wednesday, offering an alternative explanation that was as disappointing as it was predictable: the redaction was made under FIPPA’s section 19, which allows the government to exclude information protected by cabinet confidentiality.

There are many weak areas in FIPPA legislation, but this is regularly cited as among the weakest. Cabinet confidentiality is a trump card that basically allows the government to exclude anything of a sensitive political nature without having to provide any additional explanation.

It should be said that redacting the premier’s secondary, government-issued email address was justified. The premier has a public-facing email address for citizens and a second account for internal correspondence. If that secondary address were revealed in a FIPPA request, it would have to be replaced for security reasons.

That still does not justify the redaction of the contents of the email.

A spokesman for Stefanson asserted that it was a nameless, faceless FIPPA co-ordinator who made the decision to redact parts of that email with no involvement from the premier’s staff. If that’s true then, at the very least, the premier’s staff could revisit that decision and provide the contents of the email in question. FIPPA does not prohibit the release of sensitive information; it provides an excuse if a decision is made not to release it.

At deadline, Stefanson’s office had not responded to a direct request to reconsider the original decision and release what the premier wrote in that email.

It should be noted that governments of all stripes, all over the world, regularly go to extreme lengths to protect internal correspondence from the prying eyes of critics and the media.

As a result, various steps, including encrypted messaging apps that leave no digital footprints, are taken to hide emails, texts and digital messages from public view.

Officially, the premier’s office refused to say if senior staff were using encrypted messaging apps that delete messages after they are read. According to the opposition NDP, it has been five years since one of their FIPPA requests produced a single text message.

The opposition regularly bombards government with FIPPA requests, always asking for all electronic communication to and from a specific group of people within government on a particular issue. Given how reliant government is on texting or direct messaging, that is almost an impossible request.

The bottom line in this mind-numbingly complicated story is this: nobody knows for sure what Stefanson thought about the truckers’ convoy. And the emails and other correspondence that might have revealed her true position are protected behind the wall that is an obtuse and regularly misused piece of legislation.

This story does not prove the government is trying to hide something. It just makes it look that way.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com