How Ottawa Werks

The Great Canadian Archival Box-Checking Exercise

Bill Curry has another great piece in the Globe and Mail, this time about the clusterf#ck that is Library and Archives Canada. Curry’s piece is behind a paywall, so you’ll need a subscription to read it. Don’t be cheap, like the Government of Canada.

The briefest synopsis: Library and Archives Canada, one of the country’s greatest examples of institutional failure, is about to fail farther by cuttinge about a third of its Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) staff.

This means a record-keeping organization that was already an international joke becomes even more useless.

(I wrote about the same subject last June, before the latest round of absurdity.)

A national library and archives is a pretty basic thing. It seems the federal government is incapable of running one.

It’s a matter of priorities. I have been using LAC since 1995, and I have seen nothing but cuts and institutional decay through that time. The Chretien, Martin, Harper, Trudeau and Carney governments have seen history and national memory as an expense, not an asset. It’s clear that this government, like Harper’s only cares about what’s interesting to corporate Canada, and in re-election. (Trudeau’s fad-chasing regime thought Canadian history was for old farts.)

I’ll briefly make the case for archives. Geneologists love them. Ancestry.com has managed to privatize much of the public record, so they obviously have some value. We can’t train the next generation of Canadian historians without them. And without historians, we have no national story, so we end up being America’s back shed. (Someday, universities might understand this, too.) Want to research Indigenous land claims (pro or con)? You need an archive. Want to undertstand what happened in modern crises that changed the nation, things like the 1970 FLQ kidnappings and the government’s response? You need an archives. Want to dig deeper into claims made by Quebec nationalists about the “repatriation” of Canada’s constitution in 1982? You need an archives.

(You won’t be able to get files on the 1970s October Crisis or the 1982 constitution-making process from LAC, though. Privacy, dontcha know?)

This is not going to change. The Carney government is the most secretive that I’ve seen. In 2015, my book on the Harper government’s secrecy was published. I believed no future government could resist using the weakness of modern media to thwart the public’s right to know. Things are now worse than I imagined.

There’s no way I would do another book that relied on LAC records from the 20th century. Earlier his year, I pitched a magazine piece that requires LAC records from the 1920s. There’s a good chance I won’t be able to get them here. I may have to use files from the British public records office. I’ve done that before. Even the House of Lords archives is more forthcoming than Canada’s national library and archives. When I asked for post-war records from Lord Beaverbrook’s papers for my biography of Globe and Mail founder George McCullagh, the turn-around time was less than a week.

And that was when Library and Archives Canada was closed for COVID.

I’m working on a book proposal about a 19th century military campaign that has a Canadian element. Fortunately, I won’t have to rely on Library and Archives Canada. I simply can’t count on them. As I close in on 70, life is literally too short. It’s worth reading the comments on Curry’s piece. One person says they just got records released by LAC’s ATIP system. The files were requested in 2018.

LAC’s ATIP system was a solution looking for a problem. There were no gross violations of privacy before this system was imposed. I talked with the head of LAC last year and said, as both a lawyer and a historian, LAC’s interpretation of ATIP law is absurd and its rulings err too much on the side of secrecy. My own latest Library and Archives Canada fun story: I was researching a Walrus piece last fall and needed something from the World War II press censorship file. I was told the file was unavailable for ATIP reasons. “But,” I said, “I used the same files in 2006 when I was doing my PhD thesis.” It took a while but the box was fished out of the hands of the ATIP people. And keep in mind that the war ended 81 years ago. The people named in the files are dead. The government policies of the time are, at most, interesting to history buffs. The Nazis aren’t watching anymore.

But at LAC, the default answer is “no”.