The Liberals proposed a motion during last week’s private member’s day that the government repeal Bill 29.
Meanwhile, at the Telegram, legislative reporter James McLeod has been waging a one-man crusade to get everyone to stop trying to repeal Bill 29. Bill 29 actually fixed a few nasty things, according to McLeod. For example, rather than force reporters to chase after ministerial briefing notes, Bill 29 banned release of them outright:
When Bill 29 came along, it created a specific exception to end this game. Now, the government could withhold any document which was “a record created solely for the purpose of briefing a member of the Executive Council with respect to assuming responsibility for a department, secretariat or agency.”
Then there is the matter of requests for information that the bureaucrats think are “frivolous and vexatious.” The example McLeod uses to endorse that part of the bill is odd. He filed a request for documents about the cod moratorium. The Telly dropped the request when they discovered that a couple of days after getting their pile, the government proposed to release the whole pile on the Internet. That wasn’t a frivolous request, incidentally, but McLeod holds it out as a justification for that bit of Bill 29.