Polling information was the first sign of the problem but that wasn't the last example. There was a demand by the Premier's Office for $10,000 for copies of speeches delivered in public by the Premier and, ultimately, a complete re-write of the access law in 2012 to make legal what the government had already been doing to keep all sorts of secrets that should have been made public.
It's easy, therefore, to believe that the Energy Corporation Act, passed in 2007, follows the same pattern. In many respects, you'd be right. For example, we do not know why the government created the energy corporation in the first place. In second reading on the bill, then energy minister Kathy Dunderdale famously spoke only 101 words in her speech introducing it. Not a word of her comments then or later ever explained why the government was setting up Nalcor, what it was supposed to accomplish and how it would be organised.
The sections of the Energy Corporation Act that everyone is now upset about came along in early 2008. They were introduced, as the story went at the time, to address concerns from the major oil companies who would be part of a deal announced later that year to develop Hebron.
The issue for this post, though, is about the chronic misrepresentation of what those sections say whenever people talk about the current controversy over embedded contractors. Here's the way James McLeod summarised the issue from a decision - not yet public - from the province's privacy commissioner:
The Energy Corporation Act, which is the law which creates Nalcor and gives it all its powers and mandate, says the company should withhold information “relating to the business affairs or activities” of any other company that Nalcor works with.
The OIPC [Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner] ruled that billing rates of contractors would clearly apply, and that because broader information previously released by Nalcor could be used to calculate roughly how much individual contractors bill, individual company names tied to specific contractors should also be kept secret.
Notice that there are two parts to that clause. The first gives the chief the discretion to withhold: he or she *may* withhold. The second part gives a mandatory exemption from disclosure: he or she *shall* refuse to disclose commercially sensitive information
But you can't stop there because the rest of the wording in that section adds an important bit of information next. The chief executive "shall refuse to disclose..."
where the chief executive officer of the corporation or the subsidiary to which the requested information relates, taking into account sound and fair business practises, reasonably believes...falls into either of the two categories the section then describes, complete with characteristics.
In other words, there isn't mandatory, automatic, and broad secrecy for something that is left undescribed and vague. The Act places the decision at the discretion of the chief executive officer about whether or not to disclose information AND gives that person some guidance as to what "commercially sensitive information" means beyond the definition in the act at section 2 (b.1).
In the embedded contractors case, Nalcor boss Stan Marshall determined what would go out the door and what wouldn't, based on whatever advice he got from lawyers. No one has apparently asked Stan to explain his reasoning and, for sure, no one at Nalcor these days is likely to volunteer a simple piece of factual information. These folks, after all, still release pdfs of documents that are designed to frustrate copying and pasting for data analysis.
We can make a reasonable assumption, though, that because some of the contractors - maybe the one-man shops - consider the information to be commercially sensitive for them, Nalcor won't release it. That's a legitimate protection of third parties. Nalcor just needs to explain that.
As for the privacy commissioner, it's doubtful he buggered up the plain English of all this. And from McLeod's story, it appears that the commissioner has picked up on the idea that two partial disclosures could lead to the disclosure Marshall decided against. That's legitimate as well.
But before we think about changing this section of the Act, everyone needs to get their facts straight, stop, and think hard.
Bad public policy usually comes from a lack of consideration. That includes times when there hasn't been adequate debate in the House but it also comes, as in the recent Muskrat Falls inquiry, when the government makes a hasty decision based on something on Twitter or open line that itself was driven by a few noisy voices with a raft of agendas and interests, and often precious little knowledge of what is going on. That doesn't mean we should not have an inquiry but it does mean government folks should have made a decision based on facts, information, and knowledge not a few people losing their minds on Twitter..
In the case of the MF inquiry, three of the terms are actually already known and one of them - the PUB exemption - actually dates from 1998. It looks for all the world like the folks who drew up the terms of reference didn't know the facts themselves or what they were really trying to find out. They also left out crucial time periods (anything before 2012) and crucial actors (all the politicians) in the debacle. The PUB bit is actually just a sideshow. The result will be a long, costly, and ultimately inconclusive commission that will miss most of the details needed to avoid a similar debacle in the future. That's the opposite of what the government promised when it announced the terms of reference and the commissioner.
Words matter. Disclosure is important. Facts are crucial.
And in the embedded contractors story, that last element is in short supply. We could all make lots of mistakes as a result, just as we made lots of them in the past - like in Muskrat Falls - by ignoring facts that were, as in the Energy Corporation Act, in plain sight all along.
-srbp-