On a Thursday morning depressingly full of stuff to write about — housing!Doug Ford’s comments on immigrants!infrastructure problems! election speculation!the Greenbelt emails! — I promised my editor I’d try to find some way to tie all this together. There simply aren’t enough writers to cover all the bizarre things happening at once these days, so we’ve got to try to cover multiple tire fires in every column. It’s a matter of efficiency and, increasingly, of necessity.
Luckily for me, if that’s the word, there actually is a throughline linking a bunch of these stories together. It’s not the first time I’ve mentioned this, and it won’t be the last, but once more and with feeling: it would be amazing if our politicians (and other civic leaders) would actually tell us things. Not everything ought to be a state secret. And the incredible effort so many people in positions of power (whether elected or otherwise) put into trying to keep things secret is hurting our democracy. Maybe, to be honest, killing it.
There are two very obvious ways this day’s buffet of news speaks to this. Global News has released the latest instalment in a depressingly long-running series, and it reads an awful lot like the earlier ones. It turns out that the gosh-darned Eglinton Crosstown still isn’t open, and the government (specifically, Metrolinx, the provincial agency tasked with building transit in the GTA) doesn’t want to talk about it. Metrolinx gets regular reports on the status of the Crosstown from the contractor building the line. Every month, in fact. Those updates could be shared with the public, but, nah. The usual reasons are cited: economically sensitive information, commercial contracts, personal information.
We’ve all heard it before. It’s bogus. I’d use a stronger b-word if this weren’t a family friendly outlet. But you all know the one I mean. It’s [bogus]. All of it — the refusal to share and the reasons given for not sharing.
Let’s be just as plain about this as we can be: the people in power, who have the information, have decided that it would make their lives easier if they did not have to discuss the information with the public, and there ain’t a gosh-darned thing (you can tell I’m really struggling to not curse today) that we can do about it. Because it’s deliberate. The people in power weighed the alternatives. They could prioritize public disclosure and a transparent exercise in government accountability over a multi-billion-dollar investment of public money, or they could prioritize their desire to not be asked questions that are politically awkward to answer. They have very consciously and willingly chosen the latter.
And, again, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. They know that. I know that. You know that. They have the power to make a choice between the public good and their personal good. And the choice doesn’t seem to have been a hard one for them. They chose themselves.
And let’s connect this thread over to the next topic for which this is a natural fit. You’ve all heard by now that Ontario’s privacy commissioner is preparing a report into the use of non-government email accounts for some government business. This is especially relevant, according to reports, into the ongoing investigations into possible wrongdoing in the Greenbelt scandal. The use of personal devices and emails to communicate might have allowed certain communications on matters of governance to have been done “off the books,” so to speak, in a deliberate and perhaps illegal effort to circumvent lawful scrutiny of government action and the spending of public money.
I’ve written that paragraph above carefully, the reader can see. My lawyer insisted. Besides, I’m content to wait for the report before going off on it fully.
But in the meantime, like, come on. Given that the provincial government has adopted an explicit “don’t be transparent about the Crosstown” policy, the Ford government simply has not earned any — any at all — benefit of the doubt on matters of honest, transparent, and accountable government. It is deliberately and explicitly choosing to be the opposite in some cases. We can only infer that there may be others.
There are other ways I could link this theme to some of the stories of today. The premier’s comments suggesting, without apparent evidence, that immigrants are responsible for the horrifying recent shooting at a Jewish girls school in Toronto, almost certainly an antisemitic attack, could maybe be linked to the premier knowing more than the police have said, because the police in this country, in general, say absolutely nothing, even when the public would benefit from the information. That seems a bit of a stretch, but it sort of fits the theme? The premier’s choice to be very obviously strategically ambiguous on the matter of the possible early election also sort of fits the mould of what we’re talking about above. Indeed, of the big stories today, only the housing crisis lacks at least a tangential link to the theme.
But, honestly, the last two examples above are a stretch, and they aren’t a necessary one. The facts of the Crosstown opacity and the reports of private emails being used to discuss the Greenbelt are enough to make the point: government transparency has collapsed because the government decided to collapse it. This was and remains a choice. The Tories could have made a different one. They could make a different one starting now. But they won’t and, again, everyone knows this.
It’s not a Ford-specific problem, nor a Conservative one. The federal Liberals are taking their lumps on this file of late as well, and it’s only fair to note that. The information commissioner doesn’t have enough money to do the job. That’s bad. Documents are being classified for a long time. That’s bad, too. The commissioner of the Foreign Interference Commission isn’t being given access to all the things she needs and was promised.
So, sure. Consider that on the record: this isn’t an Ontario problem or a Ford problem or a (Progressive) Conservative problem. It’s a Canadian problem. Duly noted.
But it’s also a big problem. As I noted on Twitter in reference to one of the federal stories, the total effect of all of this is a kind of civic self-lobotomy. Our leaders are deliberately breaking our democracy in ways that suit their narrow interests in the short term at the expense of the public’s interest in the long term. They do so for selfish reasons — and because they lack a sense of shame and civic duty.
But they don’t do it because they’re dumb. They have correctly calculated that the public won’t care enough to make a fuss. Until that changes, their behaviour won’t. Why would it?
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