The previous Information Commissioner, no friend of the current government's approach to public access to information, made the following observation in 1999:
"After I had been confirmed as federal Information Commissioner, I met with the former commissioner, John Grace, to get his advice. One thing he said struck me in particular; he said that in his seven years as Privacy Commissioner and eight years as Information Commissioner (a total of 15 years spent reviewing the records which government wanted to withhold from Canadians) he hadn't seen a really good secret. My experience is much the same over the first year of my term. For the most part, officials love secrecy because it is a tool of power and control, not becuase the information they hold is particularly sensitive in nature."
