Today, which is, appropriately, World Press Freedom Day, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression released their first in what will be an annual series of reports on the state of free expression in Canada. As the authors note in the introduction, 2009 was a notable year in Canadian press freedom: The Supreme Court of Canada established […] More »

This week we learned that government transparency in Canada is in pretty bad shape with the release of the information commissioner’s report. But it’s not all bad news: Two new websites have launched in the past few days that aim to shine a light on the activity of government, civil servants, and elected officials. April […] More »

From the Afghan Detainee torture scandal to the Helena Guergis Magical Mystery Police Adventure, governmental transparency is at a dangerously low ebb and risks being “totally obliterated,” says the interim access-to-information commissioner Suzanne Legault. Her report, released yesterday, gave low ratings to 13 out of 24 government institutions on their compliance with requests for information, […] More »

I came out of Tuesday night’s Munk Debate on Climate Change feeling kind of funny. Given that NASA scientists and others tell us we have about seven years to cap global greenhouse gas emissions before “runaway climate change”—and the next couple weeks may establish whether that happens or not—it strikes me that a debate about […] More »

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced today new rules for how internet service providers are allowed to monitor, control, and throttle your internet access. After years of ponderous thought on the issue of how much control ISPs can wield over their customers’ web access, the CRTC has ceded the issue to the internet providers […] More »

To prepare for our regular staff meeting earlier this week, we flipped through the last year of This to see what we covered well, and what we’ve missed. The findings clearly showed us the kinds of stories we tend to cover—and pointed to a few things we need to work on. First a word on […] More »