No defence

A Treasury Board spokesman has confirmed my suspicions about the likely effects of the Cons' decision to shut down the CAIRS database:

A spokesman for the Treasury Board, which oversees Ottawa's access policy, said CAIRS was initially intended to be an internal tool, and that users can now obtain the information by going to federal agencies one by one.

Of course, the obvious result is to make the process for providing the same information more burdensome than it would otherwise have been - for both requesters who will have to make requests to each and every federal agency for the same data they could once get from a single source, and for the agencies who will now have to manually assemble and provide data which was once readily available.

Based on that background, it's particularly comical that Deceivin' Stephen couldn't find any better defence for the decision than to claim that it would somehow reduce "costs and delays" associated with making the information available. But then, on this topic like so many others, the Cons' next honest or believable public statement will be their first.