OTTAWA—The Harper government moved to retroactively rewrite Canada’s access to information law so as to prevent possible criminal charges against the RCMP, The Canadian Press has learned.

The unheralded change, buried in last week’s 167-page omnibus budget bill, exempted all records from the defunct long-gun registry and also any “request, complaint, investigation, application, judicial review, appeal or other proceeding under the Access to Information Act or the Privacy Act,” related to those old records.

The unprecedented retroactive changes — access to information experts liken them to erasing the national memory — are even more odd because they are backdated to the day the Conservatives introduced legislation to kill the gun registry, not to when the bill received royal assent.

The date effectively alters history to make an old government bill come into force months before it was actually passed by Parliament.

A source familiar with the complaint, speaking on condition of anonymity due to its sensitivity, said the government moved out of concern that Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault is poised to recommend charges against the Mounties for withholding — and later destroying — gun registry documents while the legislation was still being debated.

Indeed, shortly after the story broke Wednesday, Legault’s office announced it would be tabling a special report Thursday detailing an investigation into the long gun registry and an access to information request.

The government feels no one should face a penalty for being overly eager to enforce the will of Parliament before the legislation had been voted into law.

A spokesman for Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney would say only that the retroactive law will fix a “bureaucratic loophole” that allowed citizens to request heavily redacted copies of the gun registry data while the legislation to destroy the data was before Parliament.

“This clearly goes against the will of Parliament that all copies of the registry should be destroyed,” spokesman Jeremy Laurin said in an email response. “This technical amendment reinforces this point.”

Legault’s office refused to discuss any investigations, citing confidentiality provisions, or even to comment on the government’s rewrite of the law.

The retroactive changes in the budget bill leave access-to-information experts aghast.

“I find this provision almost Orwellian,” said Fred Vallance-Jones, an associate professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax and an expert in access to information law.

“It seeks to rewrite history, to say that lawful access to records that existed before didn’t actually exist after all, and that if you exercised your quasi-constitutional right of access to those records, well, too bad, you’re out of luck.”

Michel Drapeau, a lawyer, former military colonel and access-to-information author, said the rationale of moving retroactively to prevent a possible prosecution is “a dangerous and unwelcome precedent” that should be as unwelcome to the RCMP and the administration of justice as to freedom-of-information wonks.

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“The optics of it are not good: ‘Oh, so that’s the way it works now?’ If you do something against the law in the RCMP, you’ve got your friends in high places, they change the law,” said Drapeau. “The correcting mechanism, if that’s what they’ve done, is worse than the actual crime.”

Some in the gun-owning community suspect the RCMP has actually preserved gun registry data for its own investigative purposes, and that the blanket, backdated exemption on record searches inserted into the omnibus budget bill is a means of keeping that revelation under wraps.

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