The American government was declassifying millions of pages of documents while the Canadian government was still trying to keep most of its documents secret. (Photograph by Office of the National Archives)

For all its faults, the United States government has almost aways proven more open than our own government in Canada. And, in 1976, Philip Chaplin, the senior research officer of the directorate of history at Canada’s National Defence headquarters in Ottawa, sketched out a dramatic and somewhat depressing illustration of that difference.

In a paper entitled “Well, Hardly Ever! A Response to the Plaintive Question: Does Anyone Ever Declassify Anything?” Chaplin wrote, “As far as I know (and I am in a position to hear of such things) I am the only full-time public servant in the country who put a (sic) least half of his past year’s work into declassification.”¹Philip Chaplin, “Well, Hardly Ever! A Response to the Plaintive Question: Does Anyone Ever Declassify Anything?” (unpublished paper, April 1976), 1 By comparison, when he visited the declassification division of the United States National Archives, he found that “with a staff of 100, they expected to have reviewed 160,000,000 pages of 30 year old records in just over three years ending on 31 December 1975 at a cost of $4,500,000.”²Philip Chaplin, “Well, Hardly Ever! A Response to the Plaintive Question: Does Anyone Ever Declassify Anything?” (unpublished paper, April 1976), 3

Nor did Canadian officials seem particularly concerned about this difference. Chaplin’s paper was prepared for a Public Service Commission seminar that was supposed to take place between April 12-13, 1976. But that seminar was cancelled for lack of interest.”³Philip Chaplin, “Well, Hardly Ever! A Response to the Plaintive Question: Does Anyone Ever Declassify Anything?” (unpublished paper, April 1976), 7