The Tories quoted ATI expert Alisdair Roberts in question period today to justify their decision to kill the CAIRS database. Roberts then uncharitably crapped on their talking points.
Under outraged questioning Monday in the Commons, (Prime Minister Stephen) Harper said the plug was pulled because CAIRS is expensive and slows access to government information.
Harper then cited a 2003 report by Roberts on government secrecy.
"It (CAIRS) was called the product of a political system in which centralized control is an obsession and that is why the government got rid of it,'' Harper told the Commons.
Toews subsequently claimed the same virtuous high ground, citing Roberts verbatim.
But neither Harper nor Toews mentioned that Roberts had recommended fixing the problem by making the registry public online -- something the federal information commissioner reported in 2004 could be done "at virtually no cost'' to government.
Roberts subsequently took on the task on his own time and website, and it his been maintained since 2006 by CBC Radio reporter David McKie.
"They really don't care what I think about CAIRS or any other aspect of ATI,'' Roberts said Monday from New Delhi, India.
"If they did they would have taken my advice about CAIRS a few years ago when I said they ought to switch on the capacity to make the entire thing publicly accessible.''
Roberts, a Canadian who's about to take a new academic posting at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, suggested the Conservatives have simply gone to a less transparent method of centrally overseeing sensitive access requests.
"How does the communications office of PCO look down into the system and figure out what requests they care about?'' he asked.
"Are they going to tell us they just don't do that anymore? How have they changed the game? What's the new process for oversight and co-ordination?''
For a Harper government that is compulsive about message management and has slowed access-to-information requests to an historic crawl, the question is highly relevant.
The number of formal complaints about late, incomplete or censored access requests almost doubled last year to 2,387.