Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Sorry... no details available

"Don't know; don't care" has long been the mantra of the terminally apathetic, the chronically uncurious and the wholly indifferent.

"Don't know; don't care" has long been the mantra of the terminally apathetic, the chronically uncurious and the wholly indifferent. It also, increasingly, seems to be the coin of the realm of the political class, premised as it seems to be on the hope no one will notice and few will care what's going on.

In Ottawa, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty boldly claimed the new-old Conservative budget will eliminate the deficit by fiscal 2014-15. How? Won't say. With an expression most often seen on someone either suffering from bad gas or working under the illusion that saying something makes it so, Jimmy says it's simply a matter of cutting five per cent out of the nation's expenditures and, voilà, balanced books. Which five per cent? Details, details. Why do you want to know that? Can't say. Tell ya next year. It's a secret.

Same thing south of the border. The Party of Darkness battles the Party of Less Light to see who can be the king of budgetcutters at a time every economist - save the discredited holdouts of the Chicago School and Enterprise Institute - says do the opposite. The crux of both of their populist posturing is a total lack of detail, save what they're not going to cut.

In Tiny Town, the culture of secrecy we all hoped had peaked last winter has reached critical mass and is growing unchecked at every turn. Of the seven men who sit at council table, all seven, as I recall, paid homage to open and transparent government when they ran for office nearly three years ago.

Since then, we've moved so far from openness and transparency, I felt the need to go back and make sure it didn't mean something other than what I thought it meant. Most of the treatises seemed to be intact, no Orwellian language switcheroo. Open government is a notion rooted in the belief that citizens have a right to access the documents and proceedings of their freely elected government. Why? Well, it provides an avenue for effective public oversight. It promotes accountability, a quaint notion that someone who does something be held to account for his/her actions. It makes it more difficult for politicians to operate in secrecy, the antithesis of openness. And, it's the basic building block of democracy.

Transparent government means citizens get to access the sorts of background material decisions are based on. It means we should be able to see what sort of deals our government gets us into, how it spends our money and what it's obligating us to. The notion behind transparency is the more we know, the more we understand and the less likelihood our elected officials are going to ink a sweetheart deal that sells us up the river, enriches themselves or their friends or ties us to a course of action not far removed from indentured servitude.

Despite their good intentions or whatever they thought open and transparent might have meant, the RMOW is moving away from those ideals so quickly you'd think they were made of dog poop. It's gotten to the point where the media - and concerned citizens - have to file a Freedom of Information request to get virtually any information out of Fortress Muni. In the case of many queries, the only way the office of Miss Communication could become less helpful is if they switched to an unlisted phone number.

Take our endless parking fiasco, for example. It's been going on in earnest now for over a year. Yet, it is only recently many of us have become privy to the terms - at least some of them - of the agreement between the province, the RMOW and Whistler Blackcomb regarding parking rates. Apparently, this agreement establishes minimum daily rates for the day skier parking lots. Eight bucks in winter, twelve in summer. Minimum.

Would that have been, well, interesting information to know when this started?

Knowing it, of course, doesn't negate the questions it raises. Like why should there be a minimum rate to begin with? After all, wasn't transferring title to the lots a quid pro quo for the muni footing the bill for something the province should have been constructing themselves to keep the community safe? If we, in essence, paid full price for the lots, why would the province care what we charge? Or do they? Which party wanted to set a minimum price? Why? Was it a dodge for someone to hide behind - they're making me charge this much? And, if as has been explained by the parking committee, this was structured to be a business proposition, not a political football, what businessman in his right mind gives away the power to set his prices, one of the key levers any business has to be successful in an open market?

Well, we don't know the answers to those questions. Nor any of the others we have to which we might find the answers in the agreement. Nor the Rumsfeldian ones - the ones we don't know we don't know without reading the document.

Why? It's secret.

It's secret because it is not a "routinely released document." To understand this logic, it helps if you grab your tail in your mouth and run quickly in a circle. We're not releasing it because we don't routinely release it. We don't routinely release it so we're not releasing it. Umm... tail good.

It also involves third parties who must be consulted, not, one would think, a particularly onerous task, unless one wanted to make it onerous.

Someone committed to open and transparent government might have taken the initiative to make this document public. Doing so might have made the whole pay parking journey less bumpy. Or maybe not. You see, that's the other drawback to opaque government. In the absence of the light of day, we can only assume there's something to hide. When we assume there's something to hide, we suspect something's up. And when we suspect something's up, we trust our government less and less. When we trust our government less, it's much harder to govern. If you've just gotten this far, you don't have a tail left.

And then, there's the interesting proposition of the RMOW getting into the landlord/restaurant business in a deal brokered by, apparently, the RMOW and Whistler 2010 Sport Legacies Society for an untendered contract to run the restaurant down at Cheakamus Crossing. What do we know about that, except for the fact a potentially profitable summer in a thriving neighbourhood has been squandered and nothing is going to open until at least September?

Nothing. It's secret too.

Oh well, maybe next time around. Until then, don't know; am still trying to care.