By
Stanley Tromp, The Province
[Vancouver, B.C.], 11 Feb. 2010
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As Vancouver prepares to host the world at the 2010
Olympic Games, the event happens to
run concurrently with a legislative committee's ongoing work to review B.C.'s Freedom of Information and Protection of
Privacy Act.
Inevitably the question has
arisen on how well the B.C. government
has followed the letter and spirit of the act regarding the Games.
"VANOC has adopted
policies that make it the most transparent Olympic organizing committee ever in
the history of the Olympic movement," Colin
Hansen, minister for the
Olympics, proudly stated in the legislature on April 28, 2008. "Every
single dollar that is spent
by the provincial government
with regard to the staging
of the Olympic Games is
totally subject to public
scrutiny."
To this end, he explained,
VANOC holds press briefings after all of its board meetings, and posts all its agreements and financial reports on its website.
Those are welcome measures
indeed. But sadly they may be outweighed by grievous
gaps in accountability. For some journalists, the most challenging game is finding more records on the Games'
finances and operations.
For example, the B.C. government refused to include VANOC under the
Freedom of Information law. Yet an
entity that develops venues for the 2012 Olympic Games in Britain, the Olympic
Delivery Authority, is
covered by the British FOI law.
Its website notes that "the
ODA has developed a publication scheme, approved by the Information
Commissioner, which lists the classes of information made available by the ODA
on request, and how to request
information in the relevant categories."
A summary of expenses for the
ODA chairman, the chief executive (whose $400,000 bonus was published), the
board members and directors is available on the London 2012 website --
which is itemized for
hotel, entertainment and other costs.
In B.C., however, VANOC is also not covered by the
Document Disposal Act, which sets rules for record preservation, nor the
Financial Information Act, which mandates the publication of salaries and
expenses, and payments to suppliers.
(VANOC does publish bid winners but not their contract amounts.)
VANOC publishes sketchy
two-page "agendas and decisions" of its board meetings, but not minutes. Instead, to study the bulk of the Olympic
financial iceberg, I had twice obtained through quarterly FOI requests several
hundred pages of meeting minutes of the Games Secretariat, a branch of the B.C.
government funded by
taxpayers with a $9.5 million operating budget last year. The minutes arrived
four months late and with about one-third blanked out.
On the third attempt I was
startled to be told that
there were "no records," simply because the Secretariat had stopped
recording minutes. The Secretariat spokesperson said that keeping minutes was
"not an effective
management tool." I have since been asking the government what that term means, with no reply.
Moreover, I used to obtain copies of minutes of
VANOC meetings that it had forwarded to the Secretariat, but then VANOC stopped forwarding those, so
this tenuous supply route of information was cut off too.
Regarding who can watch the
Games in person, VANOC says that one-quarter of its 1.6 million tickets have been reserved. Of these,
several thousand prime tickets were allocated for politicians and other VIPs
and their spouses before the public had any chance to buy them.
It's known that the B.C. government has been allotted more
than 4,000 tickets at a cost
of nearly $1 million. But details are lacking, so last August I made an FOI request to the ministry responsible for
the 2010 Games for the ticket allotment policy, lists of recipients, their
categories and the costs.
After months of delay, the
ministry replied. It withheld all the records under four exemptions of the B.C.
FOI Act. Olympics minister of state Mary McNeil now says some more ticket
details will be revealed, but only after the Games are all over.
By contrast I did receive
many such records on tickets from Heritage Canada under the federal Access to Information Act, and from B.C. municipalities
which released them under our B.C. FOI law, or even without FOI.
While B.C.'s FOI law remains
overall the best in Canada, it is
still a very modest achievement within the world context, and it far too often
fails in practice. Yet we could amend our FOI statute so it could reach for the
Olympic gold medal among the world's transparency laws. Why indeed could the
B.C. government not become
"faster, higher, stronger" in setting a new standard for the public's
right to know?
-- Stanley Tromp’s report on B.C.'s FOI law, The Road
Forward, is posted at
www3.telus.net/index100/foi
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