Huey Long, The Crass Louisiana despot, once said that when fascism comes to American shores it will be called anti-fascism. With that thought from the Kingfish in mind, let’s take a look at the Federal Accountability Act that’s now before our Senate.

Dubbed C2 or the FAA in Parliament Hill shorthand, it is the marquee bill of the Harper government and it grows directly out of the promise that got the Conservatives elected in January: make the federal government open and accountable to the people of Canada.

Anyone not convinced of the need for some sort of accountability or integrity statute should read the volumes of reports that came out of last year’s Gomery commission, particularly the commission’s Fact Finding report. Gomery tells a very depressing tale of an oral culture of entitlement in which: public servants were free not to document decisions in writing because there were no rules requiring a paper trail; friends were free to take care of friends; and the system wilfully suppressed early warning signs of the then-approaching “sponsorship scandal.”

It is easy to understand how the Con-ser-vatives were able to cash in on promises to clean up the sleaze and unwarranted secrecy of the Ottawa bureaucracy. Canadians have been fed up with unaccountable government for some time.

The trouble is C2 isn’t what Canadians are hoping it would be. This is because the measures buried inside it will have the effect of gutting the 23-year-old Access to Information Act.

Sure, C2 does add a handful of Crown corporations such as Canada Post and the Export Development Corp. to the Access Act’s jurisdiction, but most of the activities of the Atomic Energy Corp. of Canada are excluded from the act’s powers.

Exclusions mean the federal Information Commissioner cannot review any decisions by AECL to withhold information. Given that AECL was involved in a bribery scandal in South Korea a decade ago, or that the Auditor General refused sign off on the Crown corporation’s financial statement between 1992-1999 because of generally accepted accounting principles were not followed, is it wise to keep it away from taxpayers’ prying eyes?

Witness after witness at the Gomery hearings told of draft reports of internal audits at Public Works Canada warning of major malfeasance that was costing taxpayers millions of dollars. But the final reports of the audits were sanitized of any urgent language and couched in bureaucratic double-talk.

At the time, anyone could have obtained the draft reports by making a request under the Access Act. Perhaps if someone had obtained the documents six or seven years ago, the need for a Royal Commission and RCMP investigation would have been eliminated.

Now C2, at least in its current form before the Senate, would give bureaucrats the power to suppress disclosure of draft audits for up to 15 years, without any requirement of an injury test or other means to justify keeping the documents secret.

In the Conservatives’ 2006 election platform, the promise was made to “ensure that all exemptions from disclosure of government information are justified only on the basis of the harm or injury that would result from disclosure, not blanket exemption rules.”

Unfortunately, the Conservatives appear to have had an epiphany toward the dark side since that promise was made. This is a major reason why John Reid, the outgoing information commissioner, warned in a special report that the current administration’s loss of enthusiasm for open government was a “cause for grave concern.”

Canadians should be concerned as well. Most of the attention the Accountability Act has been receiving is in connection with the bill’s heightened regulation of the lobbying industry.

One might also question the bill’s section prohibiting senior officials and parliamentarians from entering the lobbying business for five years after leaving government because such a ban will entrench those already in the business.

For the most part, however, the measures affecting lobbyists are justified simply because the public needs assurance that the governing process is not being unduly influenced by vested interests. A government cannot govern effectively without moral authority.

So the current government is in the process of taking one step forward in one area, and a very big step back in another. Both Canadians and this government need to be reminded that disclosure is the best defence of probity.

@page_break@Otherwise, it will only be a matter of time before Canadians will be further disillusioned by another sponsorship scandal. Also disappointing is C2’s omission of a key Gomery recommendation: mandatory record keeping. It remains too easy to do things on a nudge and a wink in Ottawa.

The best rules on the planet aren’t much good if evidence of wrongdoing doesn’t exist.

The Senate should review this bill very carefully before it becomes law. IE