Matt Malone is a Balsillie Scholar at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the founder of the Open by Default database.
There are 306,110 federal government-issued smartphones in circulation right now. Canadians can be assured that many government decisions are being made on these devices, particularly through messaging apps.
But how many of these discussions are taking place on disappearing messaging apps, which evade the country’s transparency laws?
As such technologies increasingly facilitate untraceable communications, this trend has raised concerns among watchdogs. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently cracked down on several banks, including the Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank, for using “unapproved communication methods” like WhatsApp to evade its oversight, leading to US$393-million in fines.
Similar concerns echo within Canadian governments. In August, Nunavut’s Information and Privacy Commissioner warned against using platforms like WhatsApp for government business. Such practices, the commissioner said, erode transparency frameworks by making critical records stored on non-government servers inaccessible “if the employee dies, resigns, goes on leave, or for any other reason is unwilling or unable to cooperate. They are not available to successors. They are not archived and stored.”
But, of course, that is often precisely the point. It is worth reflecting on federal government employees’ use of disappearing messaging apps on their government-issued devices to evade transparency.
While the government has banned TikTok, WeChat, and Kaspersky on these devices, there remains a glaring oversight. When I recently inquired about the use of messaging apps, the government admitted it “does not monitor or track individual apps” on its devices except for these three, allowing officials to download any other apps they want – and potentially conduct official business through third-party apps that bypass government servers and watchdogs’ scrutiny.
Government officials utilizing third-party apps (such as Signal, Confide, Wire or Dust, which feature encrypted and disappearing messages) does not seem to raise any concerns. Additionally, the use of Russian platforms such as Telegram, VKontakte, and Mail.ru appears acceptable. Discord, the platform used by Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira to leak Pentagon records, also seems to pose no issues.
Despite the Trudeau government’s posturing against Meta in recent years, including suspending government (but not Liberal Party) advertising on Facebook and Instagram, government officials also remain free to use Meta’s digital communication technologies, such as WhatsApp, to conduct government business on their taxpayer-provided phones.
As the federal government’s Policy on Service and Digital states, government officials are permitted to use their devices to “discuss professional issues … via online forums or social networking sites” and even “visit social networking sites to connect with family and friends.”
This lax approach speaks volumes about the government’s commitment to transparency and accountability, as well as its stance on “privacy and security” – two values highlighted during last year’s rushed ban of TikTok on government-issued devices. That decision was always about marketing, not merit; a truly transparency-enhancing move would see the government ban all social-media and messaging apps on all government-issued devices – unless there is a business justification otherwise – and redirect their messages back through government applications and servers.
This would also address concerns about “the use of social media platforms for data harvesting and unethical or illicit sharing of personal information with foreign entities” – the focus of a parliamentary hearing I was asked to attend last year, which selectively focused on TikTok.
More broadly, Canadian transparency laws need a serious reckoning with digital communication tools. Successive federal governments have cut funding to the access to information system and ignored the Information Commissioner of Canada’s pleas for adequate resources and a duty to document. The core law has not been meaningfully updated in more than 40 years. Meanwhile, Canadian governments have become skilled at avoiding writing things down to dodge the inconveniences of freedom of information requests. Disappearing message apps have turbocharged these obfuscation tactics.
Unelected and powerful figures like the exempt staff in Justin Trudeau’s Prime Minister’s Office and other Ministers’ offices remain immune from the Access to Information Act. Mr. Trudeau once promised to bring such staff under the transparency law, but has since reneged.
Rejecting the Information Commissioner’s calls for funding, reform, and order-making power, the Trudeau government has, instead, rewarded consultants. When his government created a user-unfriendly online service for access to information requests, it awarded 92 per cent of the contracts – approximately $1.5-million – to GC Strategies, a company whose founder is now deemed in contempt of Parliament.
As the late U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” In today’s digital landscape, however, transparency relies not just on visibility but also on effective documentation and record-keeping. Vanishing texts are obscuring the accountability Canadians deserve.