Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading:

- Susan Delacourt asks some necessary questions about what we should expect out of our federal government:

* Is this the Government of Canada or "the Harper government"?
* Who's issuing cheques? The Government of Canada or the Conservative party?
* Do we have a minister of immigration or a minister of (very ethnic) new Conservative recruits?
* Who's bankrolling the Conservatives' public-relations campaign against their enemies? Is it the Conservative party or you, the taxpayers?
* Do we decide our international-aid priorities based on expert advice or partisan concerns?
* And when did the Prime Minister's Office become responsible for campaign-personnel announcements?

- And Lawrence Martin has some ideas about how we should be answering such concerns:

During the Chrétien government years, I reported extensively on malfeasance by the Liberals. To do the math on the Harper government is to conclude that, while it has no sponsorship scandal on its books, it’s already surpassed its predecessor on a range of other abuse-of-power indices.

The government’s arc of duplicity is remarkable to behold. And there are more revelations to come. It may not happen in the next election, but there will be a tipping point and the PM and his ministers will pay the price.

- Meanwhile, whoever is benefitting from Con largesse, we can be fairly certain it isn't the Canadians who need the help the most.

- And finally, from the "making things worse by measuring them" department, Daniel Leblanc reports on the treatment of access to information requests that are seen as not worth bothering with since they're already late:

While many people believe the system basically operates on a first-come-first-serve principle, the reality is far different.

What is happening, in fact, is that departments try to get as many requests as possible out the door within the legally mandated timeframe. That way, when the Office of the Information Commissioner releases its annual report, departments can claim they adequately processed a number of requests, and, hopefully, get a good grade and avoid embarrassment.

That process, however, leaves some files sitting in the system, because they have already been deemed to be failures and no amount of work can restore their status. “Once a file is late, it’s late. There is nothing that can change that,” the civil servant said. “A day late, a month late, a year late, it’s all the same. It’s late.”

In that context, ATI workers focus their efforts on “trying to save the files that they can.” The other files, meanwhile, are left in limbo for years.

And of course it shouldn't escape mention that particularly sensitive files - i.e. the ones more likely to be seen as requiring political oversight which delays the release of anything - would figure to be all the more likely to end up in the "don't bother" pile.