Last week in the House of Commons, opposition MPs blasted the Conservative government for killing the Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System, or CAIRS.

Established in 1989, the CAIRS database kept track of all access-to-information requests submitted to the federal government.

According to a statement issued last week by the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), the database was an “invaluable reference tool” used by lawyers, academics, journalists and ordinary citizens.

In the statement, CAJ president Mary Agnes Welch said, “Killing this registry will make it more difficult for all of us to hold the federal government to account.”

But Clement told this newspaper that the database “was set up by the Liberals when they were in power and it was actually used by the governing Liberals of the day to corral the access to information requests and try to manage them centrally.”

He continued, “Our position is we don’t want to centralize these things and control these things. We want greater access to information and that’s why we are dismantling what the Liberals did to try to control the access to information requests.”

However, when the database was established, prime minister Brian Mulroney and his PC government were in power.

When asked for clarification, Clement responded in an e-mail that the program was established by the Mulroney government “but enhanced in 2001 by the Liberals.”

When asked if centralizing access to information requests wouldn’t be a useful tool in making the information more readily accessible, Clement replied that the requests were, in fact, being “funneled in” and that the federal cabinet of the day could then more easily control the release of information.

He added that, according to a 2004 survey, many major departments of the federal government weren’t even updating the information.

When asked if there was any value in keeping a central database for requests, so that people could check and see if information they wanted had already been filed, Clement responded, “I guess our point of view is that . . . it’s very difficult to keep something like that up-to-date in a centralized location and from our perspective, if it’s not up-to-date, if it’s not working to the benefit of consumers of information then it really is a false hope.”

He also said that all the information previously available on CAIRS could still be accessed through the various individual federal agencies.

According to reports in the national media, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said during question period in the House of Commons that the database was expensive.

Clement said that the program, which costs $50,000 a year to operate, “is costly given the fact that it doesn’t do what it promised to do. . . . I don’t think we (the Conservative government) mind spending money on access to information as long as it actually works and in this case it doesn’t.”