Do we really need a Freedom of Information Law?

The best answer is “Yes, if it’s a good one”. The current Law is not a good one, despite all the time and money spent on writing regulations and selling the public on the whole idea.

There is still excessive scope for exemptions, and for discretionary power not to release what has been asked for – and to delay release until the applicant has given up and gone away, or until he has been deported, if he is a migrant on a Work Permit.

Cabinet can add more exemptions pretty much at will, including the documents of any company, charity or other organisation that receives money from government.

Several stories are doing the rounds at the moment that tell of informal and innocuous requests for information being brushed off with the words, “Wait and apply under the Freedom of Information Law once all the regulations are in place.” Well, thanks a lot.

The result of this whole exercise will be the reinforcement of our government’s culture of secrecy. Like so many political exercises, it’s a sham, and just another bureaucratic boondoggle. I’m very sorry to say this, because I was on the Vision-2008 Open Government Committee that recommended a Freedom of Information Law.

It’s taken ten years to reach this point, and the Committee’s work has come to naught. What a waste of time and opportunity.


Oliver Twist

This present Law provides for 89 separate “public authorities” (Departments, Statutory bodies and state-owned companies) each with its own Public Information Manager (PIM), plus a horde of clerks and backup crew. Their job will be to strip the files of all meaningful information and dole out the remaining morsels like the beadle doled out the gruel in Oliver Twist. All disclosures will be at the discretion of the PIMs.

As always, it is the poorer migrants who will be most often cheated. What they want to know is who is blocking their Work Permits and if their employers are paying their payroll deductions into a Pensions Fund. As always, anybody who asks questions like that will be summarily deported. That was the fate of the six Dominican Republic construction workers two years ago – a famously lawless incident.
Will the Law allow us to find out what we really want to know?

Very rarely, I’m afraid. Corruption is alive and flourishing. This law will do nothing to stop it.

Who will the PIMs be beholden to?

Can we assume they will be political cronies or stooges, and if so whose?

What incentive will they have to be fair in their dealings?

Will objectivity be a handicap, as for most other political appointments?

(After all, we wouldn’t want the Immigration Department’s PIM to be a former Immigration Officer or Work Permit Board member, would we?

They would have no credibility at all. John Bostock is the only man who could have pulled that off.)
One thing many of us will want information on is what has happened to the latest boatload of Cuban refugees pushed away in their leaking boat without food and water?

Did they make it to Honduras, or did they disappear en route?

Somehow I don’t think the FOI is intended to tell us anything about the refugees, or any other embarrassment. The Memorandum of Understanding with Cuba is covered by the very first exemption-clause in the Law.


Mistrust

Many of us will want to ask about inquests on the unexplained deaths of migrant workers. What investigation have the Police done of any of Cayman’s unsolved murders, come to that?

Why all the shilly-shallying, and the unapologetic delays, and the politically influenced outcomes?

Those questions are ruled out by the second exemption-clause in the Law. The secrecy boys seem to have everything tied down pretty neatly.

There is a general mistrust of the Police Force and the Immigration Department, isn’t there?

Mistrust, too, of all the crony Boards relating to immigration, Work Permits and planning: mistrust of the crony Boards running the Hospital, the Airline and the Turtle Farm: mistrust of our vanity-driven politicians and their advisors: mistrust of the sincerity of those entrusted with our good governance.

The mistrust runs wide and deep – deepest among the first-generation immigrants and the transients. They despise the incompetence inherent in Cayman’s system of affirmative action. Those Caymanians who are both educated and worldly fear the deleterious effects of cronyism on their Islands’ prospects.

Both they and we deplore the culture of secrecy and censorship that protects the incompetent from accountability. Yes, we need a Freedom of Information Law, but not this travesty.

So. What can we do about it at this late stage?

Not much.

Even as we speak, Civil Servants are being coached in how to do what they should have been doing all along. PIMs are being appointed. Government spin-doctors are rummaging through their bags of tricks for the best ways to “prove” that what is being kept secret is actually being disclosed. Politicians are preparing to bluster that the public is being told everything it wants to know.

One thing we all ought to do is read through the Freedom of Information Law and its draft regulations. I’m not sure where the state-monopoly shop is, these days, that sells copies of laws and regulations. Maybe that could be our first request for information, when they’ve got the system up and running.