Accessing Democracy: The Critical Relationship between Academics and the Access to Information Act

Parliament recognized the fundamental importance of protecting access to government information when it enacted the federal Access to Information Act.¹ When the Act came into force on Canada Day 1983, Canada was just one of a handful of countries to have legislative protection of access to government information. Now, 27 years later, over 80 countries across the globe have enacted some form of access to information legislation.²

Although the world has followed Canada’s lead in recognizing the importance of protecting access to government information, Canada has “fallen behind” (to borrow the descriptor used by journalist and author Stanley Tromp) and may even be “backsliding” (in the words of Laura Neuman of the Carter Center).³ What has gone wrong with the federal access regime? Why should legal studies scholars care? I address these questions in this article. I start by outlining the symbiotic role between academics and access to government information. I then identify three key factors that have contributed to the decline of the federal access regime: administrative resistance, legislative degeneration, and political indifference. Finally, I close by briefly discussing three ways in which scholars can continue to work to protect and promote access to information in Canada.

Academics and Access

Academics took the lead in advocating for access to government information in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada. One of the earliest advocates was Donald C. Rowat, a professor of Political Science at Carleton University. In a 1965 article entitled “How Much Administrative Secrecy?”, he summarized the key arguments in favour of protecting access to government information, writing

Parliament and the public cannot hope to call the government to account without an adequate knowledge of what is going on; nor can they hope to participate in the decision-making process and contribute their talents to the formation of policy and legislation if that process is hidden from view.⁴

Similar arguments were expressed by T. Murray Rankin, a professor of law at the University of Victoria. In 1977, he wrote “The right to confront the decision-making apparatus of the State with informed opinions is the foundation of liberal democracies. . . Access to government information is essential to participatory democracy.”⁵

Canadian governments started, sometimes grudgingly, to acknowledge the need to provide access to government information by the late 1970s. At the federal level, this ultimately resulted in the enactment of the Access Act. Nonetheless, as we shall see below, access legislation does not always guarantee access to information. As such, the role of academics in advocating for access to government information has remained important. Contemporary Canadian academics have echoed the arguments advanced by Rowat and Rankin. Perhaps the foremost contemporary advocate of access to government information in Canada is Alasdair Roberts. Roberts argues that access to information is a necessary part of the structure of modern democratic society. In his words, “Rules to assure access to information then become part of the institutional arrangements—the ‘civic architecture’—that must be built and maintained by governments so that individuals have the capacity to fulfill their political participation rights.”⁶

Academics are not just vital protectors and promoters of the right to access government information, they are also important consumers of government information. Increasingly, academic research is fuelled by information generated and collected by government officials. As will be attested by my colleagues in this special volume, scholars in the field of criminology, sociology and legal studies have been leaders in the movement to use government information to more accurately understand and critique the process and politics of decision-making by government officials and other state agents, including police To return to the metaphor used by Roberts, access to information is not just part of the civic architecture of the state, it is a means through which the edifice itself can be better studied and perhaps even “deconstructed.” For this reason, those of us working in the broader field of legal studies should be particularly concerned when existing access rights are threatened or undermined. More importantly, insofar as scholars remain insulated (at least in theory...