Online-only publishing will make notices less accessible

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/12/2017 (2861 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the planet Earth is destroyed by a fleet of Vogon constructor spaceships building a hyperspatial express route. The fleet commander is annoyed to hear a last-minute protest from the people of Earth.

“There’s no point acting all surprised about it,” he thunders. “All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.”

This scene comes to mind after news that the province has introduced legislation that would eliminate the need to advertise government notices in newspapers.

The announcement was dressed up as a way of opening up government. In fact, it could be quite the opposite.

Sport, Culture and Heritage Minister Cathy Cox touted the change by saying the province is going to publish legal notices free of charge and on a weekly basis.

“We want to remove barriers to the way we share information,” Cox said. “We’ve noticed that Manitobans are moving more and more toward online sources to receive their news and information.”

Thus, the province will give Manitobans free access online to the Manitoba Gazette, where all government legal notices are catalogued.

It will be at the discretion of the government to advertise any particular notices more widely.

This will result in a less informed public, not a more informed one.

If you’re like most Manitobans, the Manitoba Gazette is a bit like the planning department in Alpha Centauri. You have never heard of it. You have never read it. And it’s unlikely you are about to start.

It has been the official record of government and legal notices throughout Manitoba’s history as a province. It was produced in paper format until 2014 and it is available online weekly at an annual cost of $100. It is used primarily by people in government and legal circles.

It discloses things such as government notices of changes to speed limits on roads and rezoning of land for different uses. It contains such things as public notices to creditors when estates are being settled.

Many of these notices also must be published in a newspaper — one in the area where a change is occurring, so you would see a notice in your local paper if the road outside your property is being altered to give different access to you or your neighbours.

This requirement is based on the premise that it is not good enough merely to have information publicly available; it must also be widely distributed for proper notice to be given. In other words, the government should try to find the people affected rather than wait for them to discover what is happening.

There may well be good reasons to review these requirements and modernize what constitutes proper public notice — even if it costs newspapers some revenue.

However, a holus-bolus dropping of these requirements is dangerous.

Cox is wrong in her defence of this. She said: “The goal of these amendments is to remove financial restrictions and open online access to all Manitobans, instead of limiting publication to specific regions and paid subscribers.”

First, many of the newspapers used for these notices are distributed at no charge. The company that owns the Winnipeg Free Press distributes free newspapers to more than 200,000 households in the city. Newspapers cover communities large and small across Manitoba and still do so far more comprehensively than any other medium. The point of sending notices to specific regions is not to limit publication, but to reach the affected people.

Most importantly, access does not equal notification. Posting something online is no good if the people affected don’t know it is there.

These changes don’t open up government; they reduce the number of places where government activity is publicized.

And that opens up dangerous possibilities. Yes, the government may still publicize important notices, but what about all the ones a government chooses not to publicize?

It will open the door to the government quietly making changes that it does not publicize but says it has shared with the public because a notice was published in the Manitoba Gazette.

It’s a situation where the government says, “Just trust us.” Any time that happens, I get as nervous as an Earth dweller facing a Vogon constructor spaceship.

Bob Cox is publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press and chairman of News Media Canada.