Why won’t they answer the question?

If politicians are allowed to get away with this, they can get away with everything.

On Monday, I received the Parliamentary equivalent of the middle finger from the Liberal Minister of Natural Resources, Jonathan Wilkinson. 

This latest Liberal fuddle-duddle was served in a non-answer to a formal written question I posed to the Minister in November last year. The question was about a story that the CBC had posted about the Canadian government quietly referring mining projects to a United States government funding program. I wanted to know things like how projects had been selected for referral and what type of funding had been requested to figure out if this was a good or a bad thing for Canada.

In response, what was presented was a pile of jargon-filled gobbledegook that did not come close to answering any of the substance of my question.

Before you click away - I get it. At first blush, access to information for Parliamentarians sounds like a snooze fest. However, that is exactly how the people who benefit from the lack of scrutiny on government decisions - like Minister Wilkinson - are hoping you'll react. But if Canadians want a functioning government, the government has to fulfill its legal and constitutional obligations to provide information, particularly to Parliamentarians.

The 115,000 people I represent in the federal Parliament rely on me to scrutinize whether government policy is doing what it is supposed to do, particularly government spending. But it's hard to do this when information on what's being spent and what decisions are being taken is hidden. 

That's why the rules of Parliament afford me tools like the one I used to ask Wilkinson. However, the current Liberal government has made a habit of flaunting these rules, even though they are legally and constitutionally obliged to respond, and hope you won't care. 

This phenomenon isn't limited to me in this one instance. The Liberal government, who once campaigned on making government more open and transparent, have taken hiding information from Parliament to such an extreme that they sued the Speaker of the House of Commons after Parliament passed a motion ordering the government to produce certain documents.

And the government denying information isn't just confined to Parliamentarians. In November, the Globe and Mail published a scathing and entirely accurate critique of Canada's Access to Information system. And in December, testimony at a House of Commons committee further laid out just how broken the system, which is the primary means for the public and the media to access government records, actually is. 

Every week I get countless emails and calls from the public lamenting the obfuscation of government Ministers who testify in front of the House of Commons and Parliamentary committees. An excellent example of this was a recent instance where Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland refused to provide a Senate committee with details surrounding a company's governance for which she recommended a $2 billion appropriation. 

There's not much I can do to force the government's hand in these instances. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try. Yesterday, I argued to House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota that Wilkinson's lack of answer to my question was a breach of the House of Commons standing rules. He hasn't yet ruled on my point of order, but given the Liberal government's response to the last time Parliament ordered documents, there's little cause for optimism.

I will keep pushing for access, but it's also up to you, dear reader, to force the government's hand. As long as this government is allowed by the Canadian public to get away with doing things like this, they will. Under present political circumstances, the Liberal government thinks it's politically more manageable for them to hide information than it is to be transparent about their decisions and defend them to the public. For change to happen, the government has to feel like it will cost them more to hide things from the people than to be accountable to them.

Demanding better access to information matters because, without public scrutiny, there's no motivating factor for the government to undertake rigorous diligence on its decisions. If information can be hidden from Parliament and the public, there's little motivation for the public service to review programs and spending and recommend changes up the food chain. Bottom line, even if you don't like me, for the sake of its long term sustainability, the country needs annoying, persistent Members of Parliament to review government decisions and ask why they were made. 

But I can only do that with access to the information that the rules of Parliament were designed to provide me.

A character in one of Canadian programmer Sid Meier's video games said, "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

Words defenders of democracy should take to their hearts, indeed.