#transpa

Genuinely proud of this one, I drew it for Reginald tetra's birthday. He's with his girlfriend (kinda) Mary! This also ended up taking on a new years vibe which I enjoy.

The announcement this week that the Trudeau government will indefinitely delay its planned reforms of Canada’s antique and out-of-order access-to-information law will come as no great shock to keen students of political history. Too often parties promise openness on their way to power, only to recoil from scrutiny once in government.

So it was with Stephen Harper, who campaigned on a vision of renewed accountability in Ottawa. In opposition, he spoke rousingly about the democratic pitfalls of omnibus bills and the need for fiscal transparency. Among his first acts in office was to create a new budgetary watchdog to hold his government to account.

As prime minister, of course, his appetite for openness famously vanished. His own budget bills regularly filled hundreds of pages, surpassing by far the length and diversity of any that came before. Not even parliamentarians knew much of what was in them. As for the watchdog, Harper fought the office at every turn, denying it the information it needed to do its job.

In the words of one Liberal campaign document, “Under Stephen Harper, the government (grew) secretive and closed-off from Canadians.” Justin Trudeau promised something better, “a sweeping agenda for change” premised on “a simple idea: transparent government is good government.”

Item No. 1 on the to-do list: “We will amend the Access to Information Act.” Trudeau was right to promise to modernize our access regime, as most of our peer countries have done. And in the early days of his government, he seemed to mean it. Trudeau quickly established an all-party parliamentary committee to review the law and vowed to implement its recommendations by early this year at the latest.

But last October, Treasury Board President Scott Brison started to demur. He said the government needed more time and would pursue reform in two stages, with the “early wins” to be completed this winter. Now he has abandoned a timeline altogether.

Plus ça change.