Public secrets... the trouble with Nova Scotia's rules of silence.

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Public secrets
Freedom of Information law gives you the right to get government information. Good luck accessing that. Here's the trouble with Nova Scotia's rules of silence.

by Tim Bousquet


One summer day in the mid-1990s, there was an illegal Mexican immigrant working as part of a crew pruning an orchard in California. The man was lopping off tree branches while standing in a metal box of a cherry picker truck; one of the branches fell onto a high-voltage power line and the electricity arced from the power line, through the branch and onto the cherry picker. The man died instantly.
The orchard was owned by one of the largest and wealthiest landowners in the county. Through an exercise in "plausible deniability" the landowner was able to have lowly paid illegal migrants work his fields by using fly-by-night labour contractors who actually hired the illegals. That scheme also got around any need for safety training and equipment.
On the power line side of the story, the multi-billion-dollar utility that owned the line hired a multi-billion-dollar tree trimming service to clear its lines. The utility basically passed the liability onto the trimming company, but managers at the latter were rewarded for cutting costs, not trees---this particular high-voltage line was documented as "clear" even though no work had been done to it, the presumption being that the orchard workers would take care of it.
The dead fellow was completely powerless: The people he worked with were also illegals and spoke no English besides. His death was inconvenient for the most powerful entities in the state, and so it was quite literally ignored. No one in a position of authority dared question how he died, or why, or the circumstances around his death.
A few days later, I was combing through vital statistics in the county courthouse, as part of my regular duties as a reporter, and I came across the death certificate for the man who had died in the orchard. That tweaked my interest and, after some more research, I wrote an article detailing the full story.
That story in turn prompted a government investigation, a lawsuit and public outrage. It changed the way the power company clears its lines and, ideally, has made orchard owners more accountable for safety standards on their operations.
It all started with the death certificate, a public record.
I couldn't do that story here in Nova Scotia: Death certificates and other vital statistics aren't public record. They're just one of many government records that are bureaucratically ruled off limits to the public, including vital statistics, government employee salaries, physician discipline rulings, building department files and more. Other records are nominally public, but damn near impossible to actually get.
And that's a problem.

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