FCAC report on banking high-pressure sales practices fails smell test; Bill C-58 can only help facilitate more such sanitized government reports

OTTAWA—Bill C-58, the act to amend the Access to Information Act introduced in 2017 and passed with amendments by the Senate on May 7, lessens the public's right to know and contributes to more, not less, contrived and self-serving records being produced. It endorses, for instance, slicker sanitized briefing notes being published at great expense on the government website under the bill's separate, pro-active disclosure scheme. Access to information users are already frustrated enough waiting months for records that more and more are in severed or nearly totally exempt form. That's assuming government bothers to record its actions. But now users will be flooded with shorter government pro-active releases while waiting longer for much of the backup data. And is that backup data going to produce even more severed materials and be of questionable quality? Bearing this in mind, I sought out documents last year behind the March 2018 Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) report that suspiciously largely left alone domestic banks' retail high-pressure sales practices. What I found, as recently reported on April 10, 2019, by CBC Go Public, was a final report that does not pass the smell test or merit being called a quality, arm's-length product of careful research. For starters, the final March 2018 FCAC report differed from earlier drafts with changes coming from outside pressures to downplay banks' high-pressure sales practices. Access records obtained showed that the minister of finance and his officials were able to look at and comment on the draft Dec. 21, 2017, FCAC banking report and after so did the largest five banks who reviewed a further Feb. 8, 2018, FCAC draft. All Finance Ministry and big bank comments were redacted. But out came the words "systemic" and "widespread" high-pressure bank sales practices. Recommendations that had been required became mere watered-down "suggestions" in the final FCAC report. But the credibility and quality of the FCAC report does not end there. Access records show that the five big banks were notified in advance of FCAC officials' visits to 30 of their selected branches to interview 200 bank employees. The banks then knew FCAC's timing of arrival and agenda in advance and who was to be interviewed. But the names of bank branches being visited and the dates of visits by FCAC researchers are blanked out. So were the names of the seven bank employees at each branch who were selected to undergo forty-five minute interviews by two FCAC interviewers. Those FCAC prearranged visits to the big bank branches however, only account for about two hundred bank interviews though the FCAC report indicated that 600 bank employees were interviewed. To date, no data on how the other four hundred interviews drawn from bank board chairs and directors, senior managers and front line customer service representatives were conducted. One allegation is that in some of those interviews bank public relations or human resources employees sat in or listened in and helped brief the-at-times high-ranking bank employees. Records show that drafts of the FCAC report were quickly assembled just as the last known bank employee interviews were completed, as if the agency already knew the outcome or had already written parts of the report. I have yet to receive the earliest drafts done. Most astounding, despite hearing from some forty-five hundred consumers with complaints and conducting time-consuming tax-paid interviews with 600 bank employees, the study does not quote from any of the them, or do a weighed analysis of those comments and interviews. So the study is deliberately shallow and one could say deceptive and weak. I did receive a sample of 35 complaints but those enraged consumers' comments were totally blanked out, including which bank was the source of the complaint and anything at all about the nature of the complaint. I still have yet to receive over a year later thousands and thousands of pages, including the remaining customer complaints and the six hundred bank employee interview notes however censored they will be. Whose side then is the government and FCAC on? The report seems to be an expensive damage-control window-dressing reaction project in light of earlier 2017 CBC Go Public stories on the many consumers affected by the banks' high sales pressure tactics. The FCAC report does not end up calling for real remedies to oppressive big bank tactics or real strong effective pro-consumer protection code with enforcement and stiff penalties being adopted. Instead, FCAC's produced a compromised study that only helps confirm inaction and biases in favour of the banks and an ill-placed sense of selfish self-preservation and censorship. We need less, not more government hucksterism where the people are treated like suckers who belatedly discover bits and pieces showing them their government is not there for them or in place to help protect them over special interests. True, not all kinds of records government produces are blatantly subjective or always withheld. Bill C-58, however, will do little to prevent many more such reports from happening where what data is behind them comes out late, is highly censored, and not always fully recorded. And now government gets the option of publishing and even severing summary "results" outside the access-to-information review provisions, calling them proactive disclosures. Let's hope that the upcoming October 2019 election may help shape a better and less deceptive deal for consumers in terms of the public's right to really know what's going on and who's feeding who the outcomes. Ken Rubin is a consumer and transparency advocate and has done award-winning investigative research for over fifty years. He is reachable at kenrubin.ca The Hill Times