ATIP: “Effectively they are censoring that part of the past:” Michel Drapeau

Not acceptable. A Government that has strongly supported the Monument for Victims of Communism, where secrecy was the norm and rewriting the past common practice, is essentially behaving in a similar fashion.

Does their paranoia know no ends?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is setting a dangerous precedent by retroactively exempting all long gun registry data from Canada’s access to information and privacy acts, say some of the country’s foremost experts on access to information.

Michel Drapeau, who quite literally wrote the book on Canada’s access law, said the provision buried in the government’s budget implementation bill is “undemocratic,” “high handed” and marks the first time to his knowledge that a Canadian government has tried to make an exemption to the access laws retroactive.

“I think it’s wrong, it’s very, very wrong,” Drapeau said. “There is a concept in law that laws, normally, that’s 99.999 per cent, never have any retroactive action. The past is the past.”

The precedent the government is setting by making the exemption to the access to information act retroactive could be used to eliminate all trace of other files, Drapeau said.

“There’s no limit – anything they want. I guess they could pass a law on whatever activities that this particular government might have done or may have been involved in. It could be the Libyan mission or the ISIL mission.”

“This information doesn’t belong to this government – it belongs to us people.”

The problem, Drapeau points out, is the purpose of the access to information law is to allow citizens and researchers to search past government documents.

“We shouldn’t go out and purge records because we changed our mind or we don’t believe in what it is. I find that wrong and I find it is like robbing part of our collective and national memory and to what purpose.”

“It’s definitely a bad precedent and an example of excessive government secrecy and it’s a very dangerous step backwards.”

“Effectively what they’ve done is they are censoring that part of the past,” he added.

ATIP: “Effectively they are censoring that part of the past:” Michel Drapeau