Two dozen secret cabinet decisions hidden from Parliament, C

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Two dozen secret cabinet decisions hidden from Parliament, Canadians

[ http://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/02/two-doze ... canadians/ ]

By Elizabeth Thompson | Sep 2, 2015 5:00 am | 5 comments | THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has made more than two dozen secret cabinet decisions, hiding any trace of them from Parliament and Canadians, iPolitics has learned.

A review by iPolitics of more than 21,000 orders-in-council published on the Privy Council’s website since 2004 found that 25 OICs adopted by the Harper government are missing. Only three OICs adopted by the previous Liberal government between 2004 and 2005 aren’t in the database.

Eight orders-in-council issued since last September are missing.

Privy Council officials confirm that the missing OICs are not published, saying they deal with areas such as national security, defence or commercially sensitive information.

The decisions are so secret that they are kept in a safe, separate from other orders-in-council — and cabinet ministers are only briefed on them in rooms without wireless devices.

Beyond the number of OICs missing from the database, Parliament and the public have been given no indication these orders exist. The Harper cabinet hasn’t indicated the nature of these decisions or the reasons for keeping them secret.

David Elder, a longtime public servant, said 25 secret orders-in-council is a cause for concern — but it’s difficult to know what to be worried about, since the government has revealed so little about the nature of the secret OICs.

“I’m not one that likes to think of conspiracy theories but this is frightening,” said Elder, who oversaw the Privy Council’s Machinery of Government section from 1996 to 2003/04 and who now works with Queen’s University’s School of Policy Studies.

Elder said he only knows of one occasion when cabinet decided to adopt an order-in-council while also ordering that it not be published. That was the decision by Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservative government in 1980 to issue Canadian passports to a group of American diplomats it planned to help smuggle out of Iran.

“I cannot recall, in all of the years that I was in machinery, in all of the years that I had contact with the orders-in-council people or with the legislation people, that there were orders that were kept secret.”

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Since forming a majority government in 2011, 14 orders-in-council have been held back from publication.