B.C. Railgate "crisis" offers opportunity, according to information-watchdog group

If lawmakers don’t allow their citizens adequate access to public records, they create an “insane society”.

This according Darrell Evans, executive director of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.

Evans spoke to the Straight from his Vancouver office a day after he announced that BC-FIPA had asked B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis to investigate the destruction of years of B.C. cabinet e-mails pertaining to the sale of B.C. Rail.

“If I could write a constitution, I would say citizens have a right to know the facts upon which their decision-making about the future of the society and the democratic process are going to be based,” Evans said. “Because otherwise you have an insane society—a society that is working on part of the truth or none of the truth. We are in a struggle with getting closer to the truth in society.”

Both the Document Disposal Act and the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act have been created, Evans said, but they are not achieving the desired objectives.

“This is the opportunity we hope this crisis will breed—a review of what happens with government records in B.C.,” he said.

Speaking specifically about the Document Disposal Act, Evans  alleged that  the B.C. government’s erasure of years of e-mails  is “illegal”, because they are in the public interest.

Though government staff  may erase e-mails “not considered of sufficient public value to justify their preservation”, the legislation is clear on erasure of documents.

“A document must not be destroyed except on the written recommendation of the Public Documents Committee,” the act states.

Evans conceded that  “transitory” e-mails are not important and can be erased, but said that all records should remain in a backup. Evans also said he had a problem with government staff deciding what is or is not transitory.

“Obviously, it’s totally subject to abuse and it’s subjective and evasive,” he said. “My motto for information is that within government or any organization subject to public scrutiny, information flows to the path of least disclosure. It’s just a natural knee-jerk reaction to just want to not be accountable, to just be safe. So to leave the classification of these kinds of documents in the hands of those creating them is insane."

He suggested there are other methods of doing this, such as requiring a person to assign a value to any document created, and then recording this somewhere.  "And that is then evidence and you can be questioned," Evans said.  "That’s the kind of thing that needs to be done.”

The NDP has also called for an independent and public investigation into the missing emails.

Last month, BC-FIPA released a report on B.C.'s freedom-of-information legislation called FAILING FOI: How the BC Government flouts the Freedom of Information Act , which highlighted how access requests are stonewalled.

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