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.

A war that governments over the past 25 years have been winning.

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.

They then offered jobs to about 180 and recruited replacements.

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.

And then added a more honest reason.

“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.”

Which, with partisan variations, is what most premiers say.

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

The oddest part of all this is that the changes have hurt government, no matter who is in power.

Take my call to the government bear expert long ago. He was knowledgeable, obviously, passionate about solving the problems and a great interview. The reality is that most people who work in government care about their jobs and their department’s mission.

I hung up the phone and the resulting story was way better because I had expert insights from someone actually working on policy. And it was, objectively, more favourable to the government because the reasons for its approach were set out so clearly.

By blocking reporters and the public from hearing from the people who actually know what they are talking about, governments undermine their credibility. The crafted responses from communications staff — often reviewed and edited by several managers — are generally bland and uninformative and often late.

All this could get even worse. The B.C. Conservatives’ new caucus communications director suggests denying the “establishment media” access to information. “By starving them of access, they will only speak to an ever-shrinking audience as people tune out,” he wrote on X.

The secrecy order on the government directory is one more step in choking the public’s access to information about government.