“It’s almost like writing a message with invisible ink. It’s a real problem. I bet you more and more business is being driven into that phantom realm of dissolvable communications.” Pat Martin New Democrat MP

OTTAWA—Federal bureaucrats and ministerial staff are using their BlackBerrys to send thousands of secret messages that will never be made public, Canada’s information watchdog warns in a new report that calls for a ban on instant messaging.

But Treasury Board President Tony Clement wasted no time in rejecting the ban, calling it “nonsensical” while playing down the concerns.

Suzanne Legault, the federal information commissioner, issued a special report Thursday to sound the alarm that the widespread practice of instant messaging is endangering the right of Canadians to know what the federal government is up to.

That’s because instant messages are automatically deleted, usually after 30 days, and once gone, the records are impossible to retrieve under access to information legislation.

“The current use of instant messaging presents an unacceptable risk to the right of access to information in Canada,” the report said.

“Instant messages, for the most part, are not backed up on servers, are automatically deleted after a set period of time and are, as a result, not recoverable,” the report said.

In an interview, Legault said that Canadians should be “extremely upset” that their rights under access to information are being undermined by this method of communication.

“It’s a fundamental democratic right . . . . Without that, there is no way Canadians can hold their government to account,” she told the Star.

New Democrat MP Pat Martin backed Legault’s call for a ban, saying he suspects that bureaucrats rely on instant messaging for government business for the very reason it won’t likely be made public.

“It’s almost like writing a message with invisible ink,” said Martin, chair of the Commons’ committee on access to information, privacy and ethics.

“It’s a real problem. I bet you more and more business is being driven into that phantom realm of dissolvable communications,” he said in an interview.

In dismissing Legault’s call for a ban, Clement suggested that many of instant messages are civil servants talking to their kids.

“We’ve got lots of lots of public servants who are parents and maybe they want to make sure that their child is okay,” Clement told reporters.

And he said when the messages are work-related, rules are in place to ensure the preservation of those communications.

“If government business is being done over instant messaging, the rules are very clear: that message has to be preserved. And we expect that rule to be followed,” he said.

But Legault says the rules are not clear. As part of the special investigation, Legault’s office surveyed 11 federal institutions and found that only two ensured that instant messages were stored on a corporate server and able to be later retrieved.

While there are 98,000 BlackBerrys issued to federal institutions, Legault found that there is no government-wide policy on text-based communications such as BlackBerry Messenger, PINs and short message service (SMS). Instead it is left to departments and even individual bureaucrats to decide whether their messages get transferred to a computer server before they are auto-deleted from their device.

Legault called on Treasury Board to address the “gaps” in policies around information management.

Exacerbating the situation are proposed Treasury Board guidelines that instant messages would be retained on electronic devices for a maximum of three days.

“All instant messages would be automatically and permanently destroyed within three days,” the report said.

In particular, Legault says the likelihood of instant messages being retrieved from ministerial offices — perhaps the most sensitive communications of all — is “almost non-existent” because Treasury Board policies don’t require that the messages be preserved.

When questioned, institutions tried to justify the use of instant messaging because it is faster than email, reduces roaming charges and works when email doesn’t.

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Yet Legault was unconvinced by those arguments and said the benefits do not outweigh the risks posed to the right of Canadians to understand what their government is up to.

“There are very few operational requirements that basically warrant the use of peer-to-peer messaging,” Legault said in an interview.

“These reasons to not (retain messages) outweigh the risks that information that should be subject to the right of access is being irretrievably destroyed or lost,” her report said.

The report calls on the government to disable instant messaging, except for when there is an operational need. And the report says that instant messages should be archived on a government server for a “reasonable amount of time.”