Breakenridge: Government secrecy taking hold in Alberta
It was a fairly simple matter, really: between September and December of 2023, more than 94,000 Albertans took part in the government's pension plan engagement survey. What were the results of that survey?
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It's not as though the results were lost or destroyed. The Alberta government had those results and had been sitting on them all along. The thoughts of Albertans on a matter of public importance hardly constitute some sort of state secret, either.
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It took almost two years of digging and prodding, but we finally have the answer. Regardless of one's views on the pension plan debate, it's troubling that we'd see such secrecy around something so straightforward.
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Unfortunately, this is becoming the norm under this government. Hopefully, such a blatant and clunky attempt at secrecy will be a wake-up call when it comes to the erosion of access to information rights in Alberta.
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The first request for responses from the pension survey was sent off to the government by Postmedia in September 2023. Subsequent requests were filed in the ensuing months, but those produced either completely redacted records or no records at all. Late last year, Alberta's Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) began a review into how the government responded to those requests.
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Last week, the government finally relented and provided Postmedia reporter Matthew Black with the results of the pension plan engagement survey. For the record, the survey showed 63 per cent opposition to leaving the Canada Pension Plan, with only 10 per cent expressing support for the idea of a new, separate Alberta Pension Plan.
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It's hard to imagine if those results were flipped that the Alberta government would have engaged in a 21-month campaign to keep them hidden from view. But the potential embarrassment stemming from a public rejection of a government narrative is a pretty flimsy basis for such a lack of transparency.
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This is why access to information is so important and why strong laws are needed to protect that transparency. The problem with that, however, is that access to information laws are crafted and shaped by the same governments that might have a vested interest in limiting access to information.
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Last December, the government passed new legislation overhauling privacy and access to information legislation. Among other things, the bill ushers in new exemptions for all sorts of documents and correspondence, putting them out of reach of access to information requests.
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Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account Earlier this month, Airdrie-Cochrane MLA and former cabinet minister Peter Guthrie along with Lesser Slave Lake MLA Scott Sinclair announced plans to relaunch the PC Party after both were ejected from the UCP caucus. Screenshots of an email, posted by the Alberta politics X account the Breakdown early Wednesday, indicated that Guthrie and Sinclair and the Alberta Party had agreed to collaborate. 'Ultimately, it made a lot of sense to us. The Alberta Party has the infrastructure,' Guthrie told Postmedia in an interview. 'This allows us to get to our end faster.' 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