OTTAWA—The Harper government heavily censored a memo showing the effectiveness of a non-partisan environmental group that had its funding axed, documents show.

The government initially released the censored memo, sent to former environment minister Peter Kent, following a request through access to information legislation. It later released some of the censored passages following a complaint that prompted an investigation by the office of the federal information commissioner.

The newly released passages show that Environment Canada gave the government a list of reasons to continue funding the Canadian Environmental Network, a non-partisan organization created in 1977 to connect federal organizations with leading experts on specific domestic or international policies and decisions.

The network, known as RCEN, represented more than 600 groups and used a peer-review process to identify the best specialists on policies under consultation.

“The delegate selection role that the RCEN has traditionally undertaken allows the department to fulfill consultation requirements with respect to regulatory and international initiatives,” said the memo sent to Kent, dated Sept. 23, 2011 and signed by Andrea Lyon, associate deputy minister at Environment Canada.

Kent, the Conservative MP for Thornhill, said through a staffer on Tuesday that he wouldn’t comment on the memo and would instead let the current minister, Leona Aglukkaq, respond.

Aglukkaq’s office didn’t immediately respond to questions about the network and whether there was political interference in the censorship of the memo prior to its release. Environment Canada responded in an email explaining that part of what it censored wasn’t public at the time of the original release of the memo. The department declined to provide an explanation for the rest of the censorship, adding that its employees were required to respect Canada’s Access to Information Act.

The department also initially censored some historical information and facts about the funding, including more than a page of examples of how the network contributed to consultations on Canada’s positions at international conferences or government legislation and regulations.

“It used to be that the government saw information from non-governmental organizations as valuable,” said Josh Brandon, who volunteers as chairman of the network.

“That’s not happening anymore. I don’t know where they’re getting their policy expertise. But it often feels that decisions are made from a political perspective without consulting science.”

Environment Canada also initially censored a statement saying the federal department was the sole contributor to the network’s funding.

The censorship is the latest example of problems plaguing Canada’s federal access to information system.

Public Safety Canada recently launched an internal review after the Star’s revealed it had excessively censored a document on cyberbullying after an access to information request. The Star has also uncovered data showing that nearly a third of federal requests for information, which are meant to take 30 days, are actually expected to take more than four months.

A former spokeswoman for Kent had said at the time of the cuts to the environmental network that the government wanted to save money and focus on more direct forms of communication with stakeholders on the Internet.

Environmental groups said they were blindsided by the cuts since Environment Canada officials had told them a few months earlier that the network would get about $500,000 in funding in 2011.

Representatives of the network have always maintained that their efforts helped promote transparency and public acceptance of government policies through consultations. The network’s members helped design the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and the draft the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

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Both initiatives were overhauled, a few months after the network’s funding was eliminated, when the Harper government introduced sweeping changes to Canada’s conservation laws, adopted by Parliament in 2012, that wiped out thousands of environmental reviews of industrial projects.

Brandon said the network still exists today, but is now a shell of what it used to be, relying entirely on volunteers.

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