Mandate letters
Rita Trichur of the Globe and Mail recently wrote about two missing words in the mandate letters for key ministers in the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. The Liberal party had promised to create a “publicly accessible” Canadian registry of actual owners of private companies. The measure would help fight money-laundering and other financial crimes, which are often camoflauged behind phony paper trails and puppet directors. But the plan to make the registry available for inspection by ordinary Canadians mysteriously disappeared from the letters. It’s still not clear why.
Mandate letters for ministers first began to be published in 2015, allowing Canadians to read instructions the prime minister gives to each of his ministers. The measure, by the newly elected Liberals, was to improve transparency, though many journalists like me were skeptical. These documents are typically full of bromides and fuzzy language because the government knows they’ll be picked apart once published online. But as Trichur’s piece shows, they can occasionally be early warning signs of potential shifts in policy. A knowledgable journalist’s attention to detail can spot these often subtle changes, even in documents that are readily available to competing newsrooms.
Here’s another example from my own experience. In 2015, a mandate letter provided marching orders for improving the Access to Information Act to Scott Brison, then-Treasury Board president. During the federal election campaign that year, Justin Trudeau promised to ensure the Act “applies” to ministers’ offices, including his own. (An earlier Supreme Court of Canada ruling found that those offices were exempt from the law.) But a close reading of the mandate letter showed a shift. Brison was to ensure the Act “appropriately applies” to ministers’ offices. The insertion of “appropriately” for me was a red flag, suggesting a watering down of the Liberal election promise.
Indeed, that’s exactly what happened. The Liberal government passed an amendment to the Act, Bill C-58, that required ministers to proactively publish a small subset of the documents in their offices, such as the briefing materials they used before Parliamentary committees. The Liberals touted the move as fulfilling their election promise, but no one was fooled. Ordinary Canadians still cannot use the access law to compel the release of any ministerial document. Instead, they have to accept table scraps, a few documents selected by government and delivered on its own timetable.
The lesson for journalists is that the real story often results from tedious sifting, combined with a hard-won familiarity with the issues. The work is time-consuming, often thankless, but vital for holding politicians to account.
Jan. 15, 2022
