Bruce Morton: Reply to Nilsen, Gillis, and Katz
Government Information in Canada/Information gouvernementale au Canada, Volume 2, number/numéro 3.8 (winter/hiver 1996)

Reply to Nilsen, Gillis, and Katz 1

Bruce Morton, Montana State University Libraries 2


Let me begin by saying that I am grateful for the respondents' appreciation of my efforts to better understand Canadian government information policy.

I appreciate Peter Gillis' insider's eye-view of the changing nature of government in Canada during the mid-1980s. However, in general terms, these changes were not unique to Canada. Indeed, as they pertain to federal information policy, they were modelled on initiatives undertaken by the Reagan administration in the United States, particularly principles embodied in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget's 1985 Circular A-130. The underpinning of A-130 as well as its progeny, Chapter 480 of the Canadian Treasury Board's Administrative Policy Manual, was the view that government information was a corporate resource, deserving of and in need of management. In an era of fiscal restraint, information was seen at the policy level to be inherently valuable -- not in philosophical terms, but rather in economical terms. But, as Gillis points out, little of substance has been done by the government to implement practices that have given the government a stream of revenue from its valuable information.

Gillis and Morton agree that there has been a lack of leadership at the federal level in Canada when it comes to matters of information policy. Although much of my work has focused of the bureaucracy that struggles to deal with issues of information policy in a policy vacuum, it is a bureaucracy of much consequence. Canada's bureaucracy is a professional service that is by and large protected from upheavals due to shifts in political power. Consequently, this bureaucracy is influential in policy formulation as well as policy implementation. Someone in Canada needs to recognize, as Gillis suggests, that serious attention needs to be paid (in the way of cogent and coherent policy) to the information that will flow through Canada's infostructure.

Again, I believe that Gillis, Katz, and I agree that the Canadian information industry has been neither single-minded nor coordinated in trying to persuade or work with the government to bring government information into the private sector. However, even if the private sector had been more adept at approaching the government, satisfactory results would have been unlikely because there was no central point of contact for the government's array of electronic information resources.

Nilsen and Katz both draw attention to my discussion of Canadian cultural nationalism; a sensitive issue -- no doubt. It occurred to me while writing the paper that one of two view points is possible in the matter of Canadian cultural nationalism. One would be that a non-Canadian (a status to which I cannot help but plead guilty) cannot possibly understand the essence of Canadian culture or the depth of feeling that Canadians have about it. The other plausible way to view the matter is that Canadians are too close to their culture and the issue of cultural nationalism to discern objectively its dynamics and effects. I realize that I am vulnerable to criticism from those who adhere to the former view; perhaps, this might be offset by an appreciation from those who will concede a bit of the latter.

In any case, it seems to me that there must be a recognition that culture -- any culture--is neither encapsulated in the sappiness of emotion nor the amber of statute. Canadian culture has evolved and will continue to evolve. Regulation of that evolution will not stanch the evolution but rather skew it. Culture, particularly in a democracy, is an amalgam of each citizen's perception of what is beautiful, ugly, important, unimportant, what is worth having and what is not, what is worth reading, hearing, viewing, or knowing and what is not. This collective sense, today, is not what it was yesterday nor what it will be tomorrow. The influence of the neighbor to the south may be more influential than, say, the also very real influences of the Pacific rim and its immigrants to the Canadian west, or Europeans -- all, however, have helped to form Canadian culture and will continue to do so in McLuhan's global village. It is not extracultural temptation from which Canadians need to be protected, but rather it is their senses, preferences, predilections that need to be respected.

That is all on a philosophical level. On a practical level, it seems to me to be a much simpler matter. Canada's is a capitalist free-market economy; its companies compete in a global free-market economy. To impose strictures based on cultural nationalism handicaps its information-related industries, both in terms of other Canadian companies that are not deemed to be culturally sensitive and, more importantly, with non-Canadian companies with which they must compete. It is my belief that much of the difficulty that the Canadian publishing and information industries have experienced have resulted from protectionist federal government policies (inconsistent policies at that) that rather than giving succor have actually had the opposite effect. In protecting its cultural industries, Canada handicaps them as businesses. Any competitive database will naturally strive to include appropriate Canadian content, regardless of whether ownership of the database is Canadian or what proportion of content is Canadian, because Canada and Canadian thought are important. Canadian content integrated in databases is more marketable in the larger context than it is segregated in a database limited to Canadiana. The rest of the world is more likely to want to know what Canadians (and others) think about a particular topic (whatever the topic) rather than what they think merely because they are Canadian.

Katz is quite right in her observation that the federal government has appeared ignorant that there is enough value in its information to fuel and industry. To my mind, issues of cost recovery are a red herring. Government collects data and produces information not because that is its business. Its business is governing; to do this it needs information to do its job and to be held accountable. Therefore, government information is part of the cost of being a government. The government has been consistently shortsighted in looking for cost recovery rather than taking the long view in seeding the private sector to grow an information industry, the success of which would have positive economic resonance in peripheral sectors, all of which would eventually enrich government coffers in personal and corporate tax revenues.

To Katz's observation that there is much detail in the paper and that this makes the reading difficult, I can only say that we agree that this is a complex topic and that, indeed, the devil is in the details.

What continues to strike me and should concern the Canadian respondents is that very little has changed since the article to which they are responding was written two years ago. It has been reported that there were commitments made by representatives of the federal government (at the Electronic Democracy Conference in Toronto on January 29, 1996) to release substantial amounts of information from all agencies within the parameters of Crown Copyright. Nevertheless, federal policies outlined in the Treasury Board's Manager's Deskbook3 will make it very difficult for significant progress to be made. There continues to be a clear emphasis on information holdings as a corporate resource, the main purpose of which is to help government conduct its business. While there is tacit statement of the desirability to make holdings available for purchase by the public (where appropriate and there is significant public demand), all fees except for contracts must be established by legislation either via the Governor-in-Council or ministerial regulations. This is clearly a disincentive to bureaucrats to channel their information outside the government. The policy to charge external users is based on the premise that those who benefit specifically from government goods and services should be asked to pay a fair share of the cost of provision. The idea is to shift the burden from taxpayers in general to those who benefit most directly. Oddly, the Treasury Board reasons that this policy will help to reduce the deficit, when the opposite is more likely the case.

To sum it up in rather crass US-ese --in terms of public and private-sector access to government electronic government information, the government must get beyond talking the talk and begin walking the walk. There is no evidence that this has begun to happen.


Notes

[1] May be cited as/On peut citer comme suit:

Bruce Morton, "Final Response," Government Information in Canada/Information gouvernementale au Canada, Vol. 2, no. 3.8 (winter/hiver 1996).

[2]

Bruce Morton, Dean              
MSU Libraries                   
Montana State University        
Bozeman, MT 59717-0332  USA

alibm@gemini.oscs.montana.edu 

Phone:  (406) 994-6518
Fax:    (406) 994-6518

[3] Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada, The Manager's Deskbook, 4th ed., Ottawa, 1995.

Also available:

http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/tb/pubs/md/htmle/mde.html


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