12 Sep A funny thing happened on the way to a federal open government seminar

The Halifax-based Centre for Law and Democracy held a seminar Thursday, billed as an “open discussion” with federal Treasury Board employees where participants could “talk about problems with the current open government processes and how they can be fixed.” When Tim Bousquet of the Halifax Examiner showed up, well, that was the end of the seminar. Bousquet describes astounding (but sadly, unsurprising) incident in today’s Morning File:

[We] went around the table introducing ourselves…. [W]hen we got around to a woman—and I’m sorry, I didn’t catch her name—who worked at the Treasury Board, she asked who I worked for and left the room to make a phone call.

When she came back, she said that with a journalist in the room, the Treasury Board employees were not authorized to speak without a government media professional in the room.

Read the whole thing here.