On Canada’s open government process
My speaking notes from the Public Webinar on Canada’s 5th National Action Plan on Open Government on March 7, 2022.
Thank you for having me here today. I’m going to briefly speak to you about the two roundtables I co-facilitated and (in the government’s language, co-championed) as part of the consultation process for Canada’s 5th National Action Plan (NAP) on open government. (The 5th NAP is still in progress but in the meantime, you can read Canada’s 4th NAP.) The National Action Plan is Canada’s requirement as a member of the Open Government Partnership (OGP). OGP has 77 member countries and 76 local governments comprised of government and civil society representatives.
The first roundtable I attended in May 2021 was on combatting disinformation. Since our commitments roundtables in the summer, the commitment theme “Combatting disinformation and safeguarding fair elections” has changed to “Strengthening Democracy and Protecting Civic Space”. It now includes many of Canada’s commitments made during the Summit for Democracy in the US held in December 2021. Specifically commitments under “Advancing Democracy and Defending Against Authoritarianism”. You can view them on the Summit website as well as in a press release from Canada’s Prime Minister’s Office. In this roundtable, we heard from our civil society experts several times that civil society organizations are chronically underfunded — this was really apparent in this commitment’s thematic roundtable. (I only co-facilitated two so other members may have more to add on this.) How can we protect this space if there are no sustainable funding flows to do the work, to provide education programs and training, and at the very least, to create public awareness? These questions also resonate with “protecting civic space”, a long-term and recurring commitment from OGP’s Open Government Declaration on supporting civic participation. It states that:
“We [OGP members] commit to making policy formulation and decision making more transparent, creating and using channels to solicit public feedback, and deepening public participation in developing, monitoring and evaluating government activities.”
I want to raise the importance of documenting the NAP consultation process and sharing it with the public; as many documents as possible, starting with our detailed notes from the roundtables. On this note, Canada’s draft NAP commitments are no longer publicly available. Perhaps something we can change in the NAP consultation process for future NAPs: To extend the public consultation periods and make the website publicly available after the closing period ends. That website is letstalkopengov.ca. I’m sure some of you may want to see these draft commitments as I speak. The commitment to support civic participation also needs to exist outside the NAP consultation process beyond closed expert roundtable participation, for example, to address issues of public consultation processes more broadly.
The second roundtable on the NAP consultation process I co-facilitated was on Fiscal, Financial, and Corporate Transparency commitment. I will focus on open contracting, as we discussed this in detail during the roundtable even though open contracting recommendations were not explicit in the draft commitment. In fact, we split up this theme in two, because there was so much traction and so much to say by experts on both topics: (1) open contracting and (2) beneficial ownership. The milestones created on beneficial ownership are more clear and James Cohen will speak more on them. Back to open contracting. For those of you who have never heard the term, open contracting is publishing and using open, accessible, and timely information on public contracting. It’s a movement for public procurement reform and improvement of government. One commitment that Canada made at the Summit for Democracy that also resonated with this roundtable is the following:
“Canada will strengthen federal procurement and contracting policies by placing Human Rights, Environmental, Social and Governance principles, as well as climate change, at the heart of our procurement processes.”
I hope this can be integrated into technology procurement as well. Parts of technology procurement were echoed in our roundtable but never made it to the draft commitment stage. For example:
“To commit to developing a digital justice and rights-based technology governance and procurement education program for public servants to identify and manage digital rights and access to justice issues related to technology procurement across a range of sectors, departments, and ministries.”
We can also learn from the Treasury Board Secretariat team that is working on artificial intelligence policy. Speaking of which, how does artificial intelligence impact open government?
Since we have so much open contracting, technology procurement, and more broadly, public procurement covered in the discussions, Public Services and Procurement Canada can also play a lead role in these discussions. One challenge of the NAP consultation process is what departments and agencies can get involved in open government, and to what level?
This makes me wonder about all the recommendations and potential commitments that fall through the cracks. What happens to them? For example, whistleblower protection was mentioned in the roundtable but did not make it in any of the commitments in Canada’s 5th draft NAP or in Canada’s Summit for Democracy 2021 Submission and Commitments. No matter how open or closed our government is, we will always need whistleblower protection legislation — as a mechanism to keep power in check. To hold government and companies to account. Yet Canada ranks among the worst countries in the world when it comes to protecting whistleblowers because the law only covers public servants, not private citizens. And to be clear, this type of legislative move is rare for the countries that do have whistleblower protection laws. To protect Fiscal, Financial, and Corporate Transparency, we should commit to whistleblower protection for both government and private sector workers, even if this needs to be triaged with other departments and agencies.
Beyond the roundtables, we, the civil society members of Canada’s multi-stakeholder forum on open government, look forward to this year, the in-between year of NAPs, as a year of discussions, ideation, and strategizing. We’ll take a look back at the “What We Heard” document on open government recommendations, and you should too once it is published. Last but not least, we need to welcome debates and resist the fear of open conflict. If we’re always in agreement and never uncomfortable in conversations between civil society and government, we’re not getting anywhere.
