Here’s the Latest Attack on BC Government Accountability

British Columbia’s move to deny public access to an employee directory is another step in the long war on government accountability and public information.

The directory, first printed and now online, has been available since the 1930s. The public could see who were in key roles, how ministries were structured and what political parties were doing with public funding. People could find the employee responsible for a specific area and call or email them to sort out problems.

But this week, the NDP government ended public access to the directory, claiming it aimed to “strengthen cybersecurity and protect employee privacy.” It claims it acted on an RCMP recommendation.

I don’t buy it. Access to employee emails is hardly critical for sophisticated cybercriminals. And there are other ways to protect employees from harassment or other privacy threats.

When I started covering the B.C. government 30 years ago, the printed directory was always on my desk. When problem bears were an issue, I looked up the wildlife branch, found the large-carnivore expert and had a conversation about the issues and public concerns.

That’s pretty much inconceivable today. Government workers are under strict instructions to refer all inquiries to communications staff. They craft a response, frequently ignoring the questions.

Today, the response to specific questions about a community’s bear problems would likely be “Our government cares deeply about bears and all wildlife and community safety.” Usually with a line about how much the wildlife budget has increased.

Governments have always wanted to control the message, and politicians generally believe the problem is not what they are doing, but how it’s communicated.

But for a long time they recognized, often grudgingly, that the public had a right to information from the people actually doing the work.

Former premier Gordon Campbell shoulders much of the blame for this destructive direction. In 2002, after a year in power, his government fired all 270 government communications staff, who were unionized public sector employees.

The big change was that the new hires were all now political appointees who could be fired any time. The message was that a role was to serve not the public, but the party in power.

“The public has said to us they want more information,” Campbell said.

“We have a lot of very strong, very powerful, very wealthy special interests that are fighting us,” he said. “The kinds of resources that unions have at their disposal to say ‘Gordon Campbell's a bad guy’ are pretty significant.”

In fact the BC Liberals’ reckless first year in power alienated many voters. The problem wasn’t communication, it was the agenda.