Wikileaks Canada by David McKie

Throughout the whole WikiLeaks controversy, there has been the suggestion that leaking the contents of discussions in cables would force diplomats to save all their candor for telephone conversations and closed-door chats. Former diplomats have indicated that had they worked in a climate threatened by WikiLeaks, that they would commit very few of their thoughts to paper. That point was made abundantly clear during a lunch-time discussion I had with a number of former Canadian diplomats, politicians and high-ranking bureaucrats. I politely disagreed, for the reasons that should become clear when you read on.

So far nothing that Canadian officials have purported to have said in cables is really at odds with what the Harper government has said publicly.And it's unclear whether the WikiLeaks phenomenon will usher in a new era committing internal discussions to phone calls and memory because this mindset has existed when those former diplomats around that elegant lunch table plied their trade.

Arguably, our first window into this mindset took place back in the mid-90s when a military-doctor-turned-whistleblower forced former Liberal defence minister, David Collenette, to call an inquiry into the Somalia affair sooner than he wanted. The Canadian Forces were in trouble over the beating death of a Somali teenager, Shidane Arone. And Jean Chretien's government was under pressure to call an inquiry to get to the bottom of things, which is what happened in 1994.

The inquiry opened a window into the Defence Department's record-keeping and management of information. We learned about the depths of secrecy within the National Defence. Military and civilian personnel went to great lengths to avoid creating documents, lest they be forced to release the material to journalists through Access to Information. Specifically, individuals were encouraged to avoid writing things down; avoid taking minutes of meetings, if they had to have meetings at all. And if they were required to write anything sensitive, it would be done on yellow Post-it notes, which would conveniently be removed from a document being released through access to information. And in a stroke of creative genius, officials changed the names of documents so journalists wouldn't know what to ask for. It was all headline-grabbing stuff that would force National Defence to clean up its act.

Peter Desbarats was one of the three commissioners who presided over the hearings. He was the only lay member on the panel who was plucked from his academic perch as the director of the journalism program at Western University in London, Ont. As a print and broadcast journalist, he figured he'd seen it all. Not a chance. "It was about controlling information," he recalled during a telephone interview from his home in London. "It was just another blatant way of controlling information. And when that became a regular practice of the government in Ottawa, it was just a continuation of what they had been doing and it was very effective. And I was watching this process, aghast, horrified by what was going on. But people in my own profession, journalists, just felt that I was trying to defend the inquiry because I was part of it. It was weird."

Weird, but a sad reality, which, according to Michel Drapeau, continues to this day. Drapeau is a retired colonel who was so horrified by government secrecy that he decided to continue his fight for improved access to information by becoming a lawyer. He remembers pushing for the inquiry. Once it was held, Drapeau became an important source of information for myself and other journalists covering the proceedings. The way Dapeau sees it, bureaucrats have progressed beyond sticky notes by finding more sophisticated ways to thwart access.

"People now know that they're vulnerable in the sense that their words and decisions and what they commit to paper could be subject to disclosure."

This is essentially what I told my lunchmates around that table a few weeks ago. They were having none of it, which was to be expected. But as someone who files several Access to Information requests a week and has many conversations with people inside government, the mindset that forces bureaucrats to commit less and less information to paper or email is, sadly, alive and well. And the irony is this: such a fortress-like mentality may force the very behaviour the Harper government or any other administration wants to avoid: frustrated bureaucrats leaking information in those brown envelopes that sometimes mysteriously show up in our mailboxes.

And, oh, we never did get to the bottom of the Somalia affair. The Chretien government shut it down early.