Public Servants Who Don't Want to be 'Servants' and Don't Want to be 'Public'

The concept of "representative democracy" arises in a population too large for every citizen to attend to the "public's business". So we elect representatives to look after this for us.

Unfortunately, in Canada, the public servants in the highest positions want the power, prestige, and income that comes from being the people's representatives, but they don't want to be bothered by being accountable to their constituency and they certainly don't want any videos of them doing "public business". Yes... this bizarre concept is coming from the Canadian Parliament. Here is the lead from a report from the Toronto Star:

In the spring of 2007, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, the well-known broadcasting advocacy group, began posting videos and podcasts of Parliamentary committee proceedings on the group's website. When officials at the House of Commons caught wind of the activities, they promptly sent a "cease and desist" letter, demanding that the videos and podcasts be removed from the Internet. A lawyer for the House of Commons argued that posting excerpts from committee proceedings could be treated as "contempt of Parliament."

The group responded that members did not want to remove the videos but would be willing to follow a reasonable procedure to obtain the necessary permissions.

That response did not sit well with the chairs of the Finance and Canadian Heritage Standing Committees, who upon learning that the group was offering webcasts and downloads of their proceedings, asked the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (SCPHA) to examine the issue to prevent further infringement.

The notion that videos of committee hearings constitute proprietary content that when used without permission raise the potential for allegations of contempt of Parliament will undoubtedly come as news to many Canadians. Using these excerpts in YouTube videos, webcasts, or podcasts has emerged as an important and powerful tool for business and consumer groups to educate the public on policy issues and legislative proposals.

...

To their credit, most of the MPs on the committee recognized that changes to the policies in the YouTube era are needed. However, MPs from the three opposition parties expressed reluctance to mirror the U.S. approach, fearing that some videos taken out of context could be "terrifically damaging."

I find this incredible. Any Parliamentary meeting that needs privacy can be held in camera. But the general business of Parliament needs to be done in public. Why else is there a public gallery? Why have public inquiries? Why not conduct all of the "nation's business" in secret without disclosing any debate or any votes. Voters would be reduced to buying a pig in a poke because political campaigns could promise anything and nobody would know how their representatives voted.

If you combine the above with the attempt in Oregon to put a copyright on all laws enacted by that state's legislature, then you could make it illegal to print the laws and legislators could happily keep the populace ignorant of the laws (details here). The police would simply arrest and cite a law which nobody could legally access. Of course, this would mean that court cases must be held in private because any discussion of the law that is broken would allow dissemination of the law outside the copyright barring its publication. Obviously a defendant couldn't attend his own trial because that would give him access to the laws which copyright protection prevents him from seeing or knowing about.

This would be utopia. People could be swept up off the street without their knowing why and would never be privileged to know why. The law would be perfect. The Law would be exactly what the State says it is.