Submission received by email on June 8, 2021 Subject: Observation
I continue to argue that what is absent in Canada is a meaningful commitment to transparency. In the absence of a strong commitment to the principles of “open government”, together with meaningful oversight, simply tweaking the provisions of ATIA is much like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It will do little to advance either improved transparency or accountability. Departments are well accomplished at manipulating the provisions of ATIA to block public access to information, even
information which historically has always been treated as “open”.
Consider the fact that during my 33 years of tenure at Transport Canada, much of which was spent overseeing crash testing, I was involved in only one formal ATIP request. The reason for this is that all
the data collected was considered “open”. So there was never any reason to employ ATIP to access the
information. Today 99% of the same data is not released pro-actively nor made available through ATIP.
Dainius Dalmotas www.djdsafety.com