While National Newswatch does not keep an archive of external articles for longer than 6 months, we do keep all articles written by contributors who post directly to our site. Here you will find all of the contributed and linked external articles from Dean Beeby.
The world is chaotic. Sovereignty, diplomacy, trade, free speech, science are all under assault. Daily life seems suddenly dangerous. Even the weather report is scary. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” as William Butler Yeats put it in The Second Coming (1919). We’ve entered an era of might makes right. Familiar rules are changing. Among the changes is the...
This will be a very short post on the access-to-information election promises of the five main political parties. That’s because there’s nothing to write about. With the release of the last platform today (Conservative), no party is committing to reforming the dysfunctional Access to Information Act, other than reciting cheap bromides. Some aren’t even offering bromides.
Last fall, before the Trump shitstorm, advisers to the prime minister saw the black clouds gathering to the south. The new president had not yet been sworn into office, but it was clear Canada was in the crosshairs.
The 10 men who have governed the Bank of Canada since its inception in 1934 have been taciturn types, studiously avoiding the mud-holes of public controversy. Central banks trade in trust, and must project immutability and stability. That’s why it was so unusual in 2012 to hear Mark Carney, then governor of the Bank, apologize to Canadians for screwing up.
Peter Larkin launched King’s fund with $25,000 of his own cash, deposited Sept. 22, 1925 at the Old Colony Trust Co.’s main branch in Boston, the same firm used by Salada Tea for its U.S. operations. Likely he reasoned that a foreign account would reduce the risk of discovery.
Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and Donald Trump’s White House have shown how political leaders who bond with billionaires can be toxic to the public good. Canada so far has avoided devolving into a plutocracy, but some of our past leaders have nevertheless been compromised by powerful men bearing suitcases stuffed with money. Several prime ministers have accepted generous handouts from business...
Media stories about a royal medal have been popping up on news and social-media platforms in Canada lately. Expect more before the end of this month. March 31 is the deadline for presentation ceremonies for the King Charles III Coronation Medal. Some 30,000 have been minted, destined for the chests of Canadians who have made a significant contribution to the country.
The number of women candidates running to become Members of Parliament has increased substantially over the last five elections. But are they attracting as much money for their campaigns as their male counterparts? A new study by Elections Canada says not only have women candidates closed a money gap, they’ve overtaken their male counterparts in cash raised.
The former Public Safety minister, Dominic LeBlanc, gave RCMP the green light to start selling some of its used vehicles, partially ending a 2021 moratorium that left Mountie car lots jammed with decommissioned cars. LeBlanc’s approval was issued Dec. 9, almost four years after sales were suspended in the aftermath of the Nova Scotia mass murders, in which a gunman...
The Liberal government has launched a project to reduce the overwhelming number of older, English-speaking men who receive Order of Canada medals, Canada’s highest civilian honour.
Wracked by energy, food and medicine shortages, the Cuban government is asking Ottawa for a break on its multimillion-dollar Canadian loan to help the country weather the economic crisis, says a newly released document.
Members of a journalism panel who decide which Canadian newsrooms have the government’s seal of approval have billed taxpayers at least $243,000 for their work. Internal records from the Canada Revenue Agency, obtained through the Access to Information Act, show the part-time members have together drawn an average of $47,000 annually in pay for the last five years, plus $8,00...
Pierre Poilievre faces a litmus test over cabinet secrecy this year, should he become prime minister of Canada, as polls since 2022 have consistently suggested. In the Conservative opposition, Poilievre has clashed with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the withholding of cabinet documents from Parliament for its probes of foreign interference, the WE charity controversy, and the SNC-Lavalin affair.
Freedom-of-information (FOI) regimes across Canada withered in 2024, as courts and governments tightened the noose around openness and transparency. Here are five key moments in a generally dismal year for FOI. Four of these developments made the filing of requests for government information feel more like a fool’s errand. One of them offered hope
Treasury Board of Canada released fresh government-wide statistics last week about citizens’ use of the federal Access to Information Act in 2023-24.
The RCMP’s geriatric airplanes and helicopters are long past their replacement dates, with almost half of the 30-aircraft fleet deemed in “poor or failed condition,” says an internal report. The Mounties operate the aircraft only on daytime business hours, Monday to Friday, despite a round-the-clock demand for emergencies.
Treasury Board of Canada, a central agency of the federal government, is Ottawa’s cheerleader for access to information. The institution gathers statistics, sets policy, organizes training, produces manuals, offers guidance, oversees programming, all to support more than 260 other departments in carrying out their legal requirements under the Access to Information Act.
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...
In public affairs journalism, all information has a best-before date. Citizens want to know what their governments are up to – right now, not months, years or decades after the fact.
An internal memo for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledges that poverty is on the rise for many Canadians after years of progress, leaving vulnerable families struggling to put food on the table. “Poverty rates are increasing again, mostly among non-elderly single individuals,” says a June 3 memo and deck presentation entitled The Financial Situation of Households: An update on strengths...
The federal government in 2004 created a kind of disaster bunker, where dozens of specialists huddle to co-ordinate an emergency response whenever a major crisis disrupts the country. The secretive facility, given the milquetoast name ‘Government Operations Centre,’ was born out of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that reset Canada’s security posture in so many ways. Since then, however, terrorism has...
The RCMP has lost one of its handguns - the second time the elusive weapon has disappeared.
RCMP in Nova Scotia ordered a mass incineration of discarded Mountie clothing and kit in the province after a murderer disguised as an RCMP officer gunned down 22 people over a weekend. The force’s “H” division burned some 7,000 pounds of used shirts, trousers, jackets, boots and body armour in an effort to keep uniforms and other gear out of...
The federal government established a short-lived news agency last fall, generating dozens of fake-news items before the exercise wound down. CVNN, or the Canadian Virtual News Network, “mimicked legitimate news coverage,” with ersatz journalists making telephone calls or email inquiries to produce a series of bogus reports.
Canada’s official languages commissioner has launched an investigation into CBC/Radio-Canada’s practice of posting unilingual access-to-information documents on its websites. The public broadcaster has been proactively publishing a selection of the documents it releases in response to access-to-information requests, but only in the original language.
In Canada’s doom-laden realm of freedom of information, where bad news is endemic, a ray of sunshine sometimes pierces the storm clouds. Library and Archives Canada (LAC), custodian of the country’s document heritage, has surmounted a hurdle that for decades w
A new oral history of the Village Voice, the weekly rag that goosed American journalism for decades, is a pungent, bubbling wort of a book. Author Tricia Romano didn’t write the text for The Freaks Came Out to Write. Instead, she patched snippets from more than 200 interviews with veterans – no, make that survivors - of the newspaper that...
Canadians are not whiners by nature, but sometimes frustration about bad service makes us snap. We complain when our flights are screwed up. We complain when Amazon loses our order. We complain when a restaurant takes two hours to serve a meal. Some of us also complain when we file an access-to-information request to a federal department that ignores or...
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s last expedition ship, which was located on the seafloor off Labrador this week, was reviled by his crew as badly built, cramped, underpowered and completely unsuitable for exploration in polar seas. Quest was a “contraption of discomfort,” George Vibert Douglas, a Canadian member of Shackleton’s crew, complained in his journal on Feb. 2, 1922.
A three-year freeze on the sale of used RCMP vehicles has created such huge storage headaches that the Mounties will have to start crushing the older cars and trucks at significant expense. “Currently, without the reinstatement of vehicle sales, storage is no longer feasible and a massive ‘crush’ program will have to be instituted at cost,” RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme...
A recent media release from a powerful minister proclaimed the Liberal government’s new “trust and transparency strategy.” Anita Anand announced a government-wide initiative designed to “foster a culture of openness.” She said the package, a grab-bag of policies promoting access to government information, would help build trust in an age of misinformation and disinformation.
An internal review of the RCMP’s control policies for its uniforms, launched after a gunman used official clothing to impersonate a Mountie as he murdered 22 Nova Scotians in 2020, says rules are being broken and better accountability is needed. “The Review concluded that policies are in place for the ordering, reimbursement and disposal of uniform items, but that procedures...
Inger Hansen (1929-2013), Canada’s first information commissioner, knew something about political tyranny and open government. Hansen forfeited a normal childhood while growing up in Copenhagen during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, from 1940 to 1945. She witnessed Jewish classmates suddenly disappearing, gone into hiding, the teacher cautioning her to say not a word. She was trained by the Danish underground...
Good journalists frequently have barbed encounters with flaks for government ministers and departments, who delay, duck and obfuscate when asked direct questions. Bad journalists simply resign themselves to quoting their non-answers. Years ago, the flak pack was handed a fresh dodge: the Access to Information Act.
There’s trouble in the ring at the RCMP’s iconic Musical Ride, where the horses are well cared for but their riders in red serge are feeling neglected and skittish. An internal review of the show, which features synchronized equestrians, found overworked officers in the saddle with “significant” morale problems, many of whom just want to leave the unit.
The first line of this century-old stanza is often quoted as a proverb to encourage patience. Few realize the rest of it expresses something more despairing; that is, long waits are often futile. These four lines sadly apply to journalists’ access-to-information requests, which typically grind on so slowly that a stale response is usually dead on arrival. I once waited...
The RCMP receives “insufficient federal investment” to carry out its increased responsibilities as Canada’s national policing service, Public Safety Canada officials have told the minister. The force must cope with “the rise of social disorder in a post-pandemic environment, and increasing complexity of threats to Canada’s security” while operating under an antiquated policing model that was established almost a century...
Lincoln Alexander’s legacy of facing down racism in Canada is being celebrated again during this year’s Black History Month. Alexander (1922-2012) called out bigotry as an obscure black law student in the early 1950s, through to his election in 1968 as Canada’s first black MP; and later, as the country’s first black cabinet minister (1979-80), continuing in his post as...
In their heyday, newspapers maintained ‘morgues,’ musty places where clippings were indexed and stored. Sagacious librarians ran these fiefdoms, locating yellowed newsprint scraps after being given only the barest clue from a harried reporter. Today, news morgues have morphed into self-serve databases, as open as Google or paywalled to extract residual value from yesterday’s news and information. The process is...
Canada’s top court last week roundly affirmed the confidentiality of cabinet documents, in a ruling that dismissed a challenge to secrecy’s status quo. In a unanimous 7-0 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada found that 23 mandate letters that Ontario Premier Doug Ford issued to his ministers in 2018 were properly denied to the CBC, which had asked for them...
Reporters have been bailing on freedom-of-information requests everywhere you look these days. The numbers are sagging federally, as well as in provinces such as Ontario. Weary journalists are abandoning a tortuous process that makes them wait months to receive packages of blank pages. A new report shows the phenomenon is also hitting British Columbia hard. The province that once had...
Journalists are sometimes in the business of keeping secrets. They have a duty to protect the anonymity of their sources and contacts, and can even serve jail time if a court rules against their silence.
A lot of great scoops about government are hiding in plain sight. Open-source documents offering juicy news nuggets are often overlooked by reporters, who may not even know to look for them. Stepping off the treadmill of press releases, news conferences, calendar events and other pre-digested sources can pay dividends to enterprising journalists who are ready to break from the...
Journalists in Canada have long been minor users of freedom-of-information laws, for reasons that aren’t hard to fathom. Reporters are a practical bunch, and FOI delivers results unreliably and after a long wait. Many decided long ago that it’s not worth the hassle.
Ed Broadbent (1936-2024), who died this week at age 87, was a decent and honourable Canadian, a skilled politician respected by every player in a now-lost era of civility in Parliament. I never met the former leader of the New Democratic Party. But 33 years ago I spoke with him in an exchange that still sparkles in my memory.
Millions of dollars arrive each year at the Bank of Canada in the form of bank notes that are melted, ripped, tainted with human blood, contaminated with mouse droppings and stained by red dye. Through a kind of sanctioned money-laundering, they’re inspected, verified and returned in digital form to customers’ bank accounts at full face value.
This year is a milestone for government transparency in Canada, marking 50 years since an obscure politician from Western Canada finally got some traction in his crusade for a national freedom-of-information law. Ged Baldwin (1907-1991), a lawyer and Progressive Conservative MP for Alberta’s Peace River riding, has been called the father and grandfather of the federal Access to Information Act...
The RCMP has blown past a deadline for responding to a scathing public inquiry into the deaths of 22 Nova Scotians at the hands of an armed killer in 2020. The force had promised to release a “public strategy and action plan” by the end of 2023, outlining how it would implement sweeping reforms called for by the Mass Casualty Commission (MCC).
The great Charles Dickens in his 1857 novel Little Dorrit satirized how government bureaucracies serve themselves rather than citizens.