Still irresponsible

As part of last week's developments on the Afghan detainee cover-up, the Cons have started using two new excuses for refusing to turn over the information demanded by Parliament. So while I'll note in another post today why it's pointless to spend much time answering the Cons' deflection tactics, I'll take a moment for now to note why neither the Canada Evidence Act nor the Privacy Act actually gives the Cons any excuse for continuing to hide the information.

Simply put, both of the statutes involved - like the Access to Information Act which I discussed earlier - create express ministerial responsibility for the decisions made surrounding information. Which means that anytime the Cons effectively claim that decisions about disclosing the information aren't theirs to make, they're hiding from their own job descriptions just as plainly as they're hiding the information from the public.

In the case of the Privacy Act, it's the head of a government department (i.e. the responsible minister) who's required by law to assess whether requested information should be disclosed - including under a public interest exemption (see section 8(1)(m)). Which means that any time a Con minister claims that the Privacy Act somehow ties his hands, he's deliberately abdicating his statutory responsibility.

In the case of the Canada Evidence Act, it's at best questionable whether the section relied on by the Cons even applies to the treatment of information generally as opposed to its handling within a specific judicial proceeding. But it's absolutely clear that any decision to certify information as "sensitive" or "potentially injurious" must be made by the Attorney General rather than by some group of anonymous staffers - and that the Attorney General also has explicit authority to allow information to be disclosed even if it meets those definitions.

So while the excuse has changed slightly, the story remains the same. As part of their cover-up on torture, Con cabinet ministers are both misleading the public about what their duties actually are, and falsely claiming that there's some legal reason why they can't release information about detainee treatment when they hold specific power to make that information public. And no matter how much (or how little) significance there is to what the Cons are keeping hidden, the fact that they're so eager to mislead Canadians about how and why they're hiding it should itself provide reason to consider the Cons unfit for public office.