David McKie Bio

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that journalists, or anyone else for that matter, have no right to records such as personal agendas that reside in the offices of the Prime Minister and his or her cabinet ministers.  

The news is good and bad.

In 2006, Canada sold about $360 million worth of arms, such as bombs torpedoes and rockets, to such countries as Chile, France and Oman. It sold aircraft and so-called "specially designed components" to Egypt.

That was then. What about now?

UPDATED: Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon tabled his department's 2007-2009 Report on Exports on Military Goods From Canada Friday afternoon. NDP critic Paul Dewar, who has been demanding the report for the past few weeks, said that while he's happy the latest report is finally public, it's a shame the government decided to table the document on a Friday afternoon just before Parliament takes a week off.

Read David McKie's story on the 2007-2009 numbers.

And after the jump, read the backstory and view maps that detail the numbers for 2003-2006. Once I've had time to read and make sense of this latest report, I'll produce an update. ...

When allegations surfaced from two University of Ottawa professors that someone was using access to information to spy on them, it got me thinking uncomfortable thoughts about a law that I defend as an advocate, use as a journalist and teach as an instructor.

A report Feb. 11 revealed professors Amir Attaran and Errol Mendes were the subjects of voluminous access to information requests demanding files such as expenses and teaching records. 

On the surface, such a demand should not be considered newsworthy, except perhaps for the scope and volume of the requests. But what really raised eyebrows was the professors' suspicion that federal Conservatives were behind the requests, though they had no proof and the Conservative Party denied having anything to do with it. The Prime Minister's Office refused to comment on the matter.

You see, by law, the identity of requesters is supposed to remain a secret, something a spokesperson in the PMO rightly pointed out. Mendes and Attaran suspect they were targeted because they have been outspoken critics of the Conservative government and are seen by some as Liberal sympathizers. Attaran, for instance, used the Access to Information Act himself to dig up lots of material regarding Afghan detainees, an issue that many suspect moved Prime Minister Stephen Harper to prorogue Parliament last year.

Whether the suspicion of political skullduggery should have made news is not the reason for this column. Instead, the allegations point to some of the contradictions and pitfalls inherent in a law that at worst is ill-defined and archaic, and at best, a catalyst for democracy. Indeed, these large requests have potential consequences, and not all of them good.

Here's what I mean...

(Hear David McKie's story from World Report above)

While the saga of Christiane Ouimet and the public accounts committee's investigation of her time as the public sector integritycommissioner of Canada continues, some interesting numbers have emerged that may shed some light on the way that she did - or didn't do -- her job.

The committee wants to find out why the former watchdog for public sector whistleblowers never found a single case of wrongdoing during her time as the person in charge of the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner of Canada. The auditor general lambasted Ouimet's performance and suggested the office to take another look at the complaints.

The MPs on the committee would like to hear from Ouimet and there's all kinds of speculation about why that might not happen.

"The safety and security of Canadians is of utmost concern to the Government. Put simply, there is no higher priority. For this reason, extensive efforts were undertaken to meet the urgent needs of all Canadians seeking to flee the deteriorating security situation and return to Canada."

Sound familiar?

Aside from the past verb tense, this could be mistaken for what foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon -- or the prime minister, for that matter -- has been saying to reassure Canadians the government is doing all it can to help its citizens get out of Egypt.

In fact, these words are from former foreign affairs minister Peter MacKay testifying before the standing committee on foreign affairs following the evacuation of 13,000 Canadians from a war-torn Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

MacKay described the operation then as "several times larger in scale and scope" than other recent emergency events, including the 2004 tsunami in South Asia.

Admittedly, the context was different in Lebanon, which was a country at war in the wake of the July 12, 2006, Hezbollah attack on Israel. That country fought back through attacks by air, ground and water.

Still, there are some similarities to the current situation in Egypt - and clues to things worth watching for in coming days.

There are too many statistics to discuss in this space, but let me to mention a few of the numbers in the third quarter for 2010 that caught my attention....

Depending on who you talk to, Health Canada is either too slow to approve drugs or does this important job too quickly.

Many of Health Canada's critics, holed up in talks in Ottawa with the department until the end of the week, charge that too many dangerous drugs are finding their way on to the market. As proof, they point to drugs such as Vioxx, the anti-inflammatory medication that was pulled from the worldwide market several years ago over safety concerns.

Today, there's concern about a number of drugs that have been the subject of warning letters from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and, to a lesser extent, Health Canada.

Not surprisingly, the drug industry sees it the other way. Its representative in Ottawa, an organization that goes by the acronym Rx&D, claims that Canadian regulators take too long, averaging about 545 days to review their safety data before deciding whether the drug is safe enough to market. Normand LaBerge, the organization's spokesperson, told me when I interviewed him the other day for my stories on the Health Canada talks, that this average figure consistently overshoots the department's own target of 300 days.

So who do you believe?

The truth, as is usually the case, is probably somewhere in the middle...