The big problem with the Winnipeg lab affair was obvious from the start: too much secrecy

The release of 623 pages of documents on the firing of two scientists from the National Microbiology Lab in 2019 understandably generated excitement around Parliament Hill on Wednesday, setting off a race to discover and frame exactly what kind of scandal they revealed.

What the documents tell us is certainly interesting and relevant, and will help us fill in a picture that has been frustratingly incomplete for more than three years.

But the biggest problem here might still be the one that was obvious from the start: the sheer amount of secrecy that enveloped this case. And the release of those 623 pages — even partially redacted — only renews questions about how much of that secrecy was actually necessary.

Political stubbornness is at least partly to blame for the long delay in releasing the documents. The federal government was reluctant from the outset to explain what had happened. In response, opposition MPs — constituting a majority in the House of Commons — demanded that the government turn over documents about the scientists to a House committee.

The Liberal government invoked privacy and security concerns and instead sought to send the documents to the special national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians — a committee that exists outside Parliament but whose members have national security clearance. The Conservatives objected to that arrangement and responded by pulling their members from that committee.

The stand-off ultimately resulted in the House voting in June 2021 to hold the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada in contempt for refusing to comply with its orders. 

The government then suggested that an ad hoc committee of MPs, assisted by a panel of arbiters who could make decisions on the release of information, be given access to the documents. The proposal was based on what was done in 2010 when Parliament demanded that Stephen Harper’s Conservative government turn over documents related to the treatment of Afghan detainees.

The opposition was unmoved. A few days later, the Liberal government asked the Federal Court to block Parliament’s order. The courts might have been expected to endorse Parliament’s authority and prerogative. But the dissolution of Parliament for an election in the fall of 2021 brought the parliamentary and legal processes to a halt.

How MPs finally got to see the documents

Partisans will view one side or the other as the villain in that sequence of events — the government for not being transparent and flouting the will of Parliament, or the opposition for being unreasonable or irresponsible in its demands. 

It’s also possible that both sides were motivated by at least some amount of justifiable concern — that the government had legitimate cause to demand as much protection as possible for information that could involve national security, and that the opposition was well within its rights and responsibilities to demand as much transparency as possible to hold the government to account.

Ideally, the two sides would have landed quickly on an arrangement that satisfied those concerns and priorities. But it wasn’t until May 2023 that all parties finally agreed to the ad hoc committee the government proposed two years earlier.

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