16 Jun A hint of Orwell-creep in Justin’s young government

The Trudeau administration has purged the Prime Minister’s official website of news releases issued during Stephen Harper’s reign, and asked Google to ensure its search results no longer point to the deleted material. News stories about the issue have mostly concentrated on the requests to Google, but the purge itself is the real problem.

Liberal dismiss the controversy, insisting it was only a housekeeping effort to ensure search results produced up-to-date information. They’re right, insofar as the 51 requests to Google for search engine updates are concerned. But that leaves the question why historic content was purged in the first place.

The deleted material, or some of it, has been retained and moved to an archive section of the Library and Archives Canada website, though it’s not clear the material is fully accessible by the public yet. So you could say Trudeau’s people haven’t exactly burned the history books; they’ve just packed them in boxes and moved them to an attic where they’ll be harder to find.

I would never uphold the Government of Nova Scotia as a paragon of openness and transparency. Its Freedom of Information system remains a shambles, despite promising work by Information Commissioner Catherine Tully to clear a backlog of several years.

Still, at novascotia.ca/news, you can find every news release issued by the provincial government since 1998, a period spanning the administrations of four premiers and three parties. At the Finance Department website, you can find every budget document issued since 1996, when John Savage was premier.

That’s because it’s the Government of Nova Scotia website, not the McNeil government website, a distinction lost on federal Treasury Board chair Scott Brison, who defended the Trudeau government’s docu-cleansing.

History did not begin on November 4, 2015, the day Trudeau took office, and neither did the Government of Canada or the website that bears its imprimatur.