OTTAWA, ON: The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) expressed disgust with the federal government’s gutting of MP Brent Rathgeber’s Bill C-461 yesterday during a meeting of the House of Commons committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics.

In its original form, Bill C-461 would have given Canadians the right to access exact salary and job description information for those government employees earning over $188,000. Yesterday in committee, Conservative MP Brad Butt moved an amendment on behalf of the federal government to raise that level to $319,000. Every Conservative MP present at the committee meeting voted in favour.

“It’s absolutely disgusting that the government would gut a piece of accountability legislation in order to keep taxpayers from finding out what senior government employees do and make,” said CTF Federal Director Gregory Thomas. “What are they trying to hide?”

Prior to the committee vote, the CTF called on its supporters to contact members of the committee as well as the Prime Minister to implore them to lower, not raise the disclosure threshold.

“We know these committee members got hundreds upon hundreds of emails over the past couple of days on Bill C-461 and it’s doubtful even a single one of them asked the government to be less transparent and hide more information,” continued Thomas. “Not one witness, nor one committee member even spoke to why increasing the threshold was a good idea. Probably because they couldn’t think of even one good reason.”

The CTF is hopeful that when Bill C-461 gets back to the House, MPs will see the error of their ways and reject the committee’s amendment.