Publication ban: An antiquated notion?

Legal notice: There are no links whatsoever in this post.

Ok, now that I’ve covered that… the publication ban on certain testimony at the Gomery Inquiry is the big story right now. Or, make that the big non-story. It’s almost amusing watching media outlets fall all over each other to report on how they’re “not allowed to report” what most people already know by reading certain American websites. Or to watch Canadian bloggers get threatened with lawsuits for linking to these websites. As if anyone who reads a blog can’t figure out how to find the information online on their own.

But hey, governments are usually way behind the times, especially when it comes to the Internet.

So, given the impossibility of putting a genie back into a bottle, are publication bans outdated notions that have no practical application in today’s reality?

Well, no, not entirely. There are still circumstances that argue for a publication ban. Not reporting the name of a minor rape victim, for example. Not publishing information of a sensitive nature in terms of national security. There are times that warrant media discretion, and since the media isn’t known for being discreet, sometimes a judge has to impose that discretion.

So is this one of those cases? Well, no. That’s the short answer.

As Canadian taxpayers, we’re all the victims of the sponsorship scandal. The whole point of having an inquiry in the first place is to get the details out in the open, so that we can avoid government cover-ups and learn exactly what happened to all this money. It’s absurd that our government could be on the verge of collapse, but ordinary Canadians aren’t allowed to know what’s going on or why.

Irony: everyone was sick and tired of hearing about the inquiry… until we no longer had access to information about it. Now we’re all scrambling for information about it because someone told us we can’t have any. It’s enough to make me wonder if that was the point…

The upshot is that arguments about tainting a potential jury pool just don’t wash here. The future of our government should not be decided in seclusion in a back room somewhere. The whole principle of democracy says that the people have a right to be involved. This affects us. And with the traditional media barred from reporting on this story, people will seek out information on American blogs or wherever else they can find it, rendering the publication ban useless and counter-productive.

So come on, Justice Gomery: lift the publication ban so we can all go happily back to ignoring the inquiry, just like before.