'Stonewalled': Trans Mountain hides dealings with private security and spy firms
CBC
A federally owned pipeline company is withholding records that would expose its dealings with private security and intelligence firms by citing blanket exemptions under access-to-information law.
Calgary-based Trans Mountain responded to a request to see its contracts with these agencies, along with reports delivered under those deals, by refusing to release a single piece of paper, prompting CBC News to lodge an official complaint.
"Trans Mountain Corporation cannot provide the records you have requested as they are exempt under the [Access to Information] Act," wrote Shelley Sapieha, information and records management adviser, in a letter copied to the company's general counsel Kevin Thrasher.
Disclosing these records could reveal information obtained during investigations aimed at the detection, prevention or suppression of crime, which is shielded by Section 16 of the Access to Information Act, Sapieha's letter says.
The records could expose the identity of a confidential source; information on criminal methods or techniques; technical information about weapons or potential weapons; or information on infrastructure vulnerabilities, all exempt by that section, the letter says.
The corporation also cites sections 17 through 20 which, respectively, shield information that could threaten individual safety; information on Canada's economic interests; personal information; and confidential information supplied by a third party.
While Canada's intelligence, defence and police agencies regularly use these sections to withhold files, they also routinely release secret papers in declassified form despite them.
The company's bid to withhold records comes as little surprise to people who obtained what they call alarming and frightening glimpses into its intelligence holdings.
"The reason they claim that exemption is: without any evidence, and this is a Canadian tradition, they continue to pathologize any form of Indigenous resistance as being criminal or terroristic," said Joe Killoran, a criminal defence lawyer in Kamloops, B.C.
"There's no evidence to support that."
Killoran filed access-to-information requests during his court defence of the Tiny House Warriors, a Secwépemc-led activist collective blocking development of the Trans Mountain expansion near Blue River in the B.C. interior.
The expansion would twin the existing 1,150-kilometre pipe stretching from Edmonton to Burnaby near Vancouver. The Trudeau government bought Trans Mountain in 2018 for $4.5 billion. Since then, the expansion's estimated cost has soared to $21.4 billion.
Members of the Tiny House Warriors were tried and convicted of mischief for storming 2018 meetings in Kamloops led by former Supreme Court judge Frank Iacobucci, which the courts ordered after Canada failed to perform its constitutionally mandated duty to consult with First Nations.
After an initial denial followed by delay, on June 5, 2019, Killoran got access to the some of the company's files.
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