Without a trace

Earlier this week, I noted that the main lesson one Con source seemed to have taken from Christian Paradis' office's illegal suppression of information was to simply avoid leaving a paper trail while continuing to engage in the same activities. Now, Lawrence Martin writes that the idea is in fact far from a new one - and one of the Harper PCO's orders to the public service is to similarly avoid documenting what's actually happening within the federal government:

There's an easy way to prevent anyone from getting access to your records, a veteran bureaucrat explained this week – don't keep records. Team Harper is catching on, he said. There's far less documentation, far less record-keeping. It's the formula for deniability. Why not make it the way of the future?

The bureaucrat was at the Department of National Defence, where the Afghan detainee affair has brought controversy, some of it prompted by journalistic prying through access laws. “I get a call from the Privy Council Office,” he said. “They're setting up a conference call. The first thing that's said is ‘No note-taking, no recordings, nothing. We don't want to see anything in writing on this.' … That's the way they develop policies now and, for my money, it's scary.”