Imagine if a senior operative working behind the scenes of Premier Danielle Smith’s government scheduled a private meeting with a bunch of oil industry lobbyists to chat about Alberta’s policies.

One of the lobbyists responds to the invitation by sending over an agenda with a range of topics and proposals including the creation of new subsidies for the oilpatch, crafting a strategy to fight federal government rules aimed at cracking down on pollution and introducing obstacles to make it difficult for renewable energy projects to launch.

The lobbyist also proposes they discuss a bailout plan for a company that is near bankruptcy, but facing a multimillion-dollar bill to clean up a bunch of contaminated sites where it used to operate.

This scenario is not all that far-fetched in a province that has access to the world’s third-largest reserves of oil, following Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

But what happens when a government that is supposedly operating in a free democracy breaks the law to conceal its dealings with lobbyists?

Sadly, I believe this is what happened earlier this year when the Alberta government began to systematically refuse to release records of its meetings with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and other oil and gas lobbyists. Although we know officials from at least four ministries have been significantly influenced through regular meetings with industry lobbyists, the departments collectively refused to accept more than 20 separate requests I made through freedom of information legislation since the beginning of 2023 to get the details.

But there’s also some good news I can share. Thanks to The Narwhal’s persistence, a provincial watchdog — Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta Diane McLeod — has agreed to launch a systemic investigation after we filed a complaint detailing a plethora of evidence we have collected about an apparent cover-up.

How Alberta government secrecy prompted my watchdog complaint

Through my research, I learned officials from across the Alberta government arranged private meetings amongst themselves to discuss how to deal with my requests. And it isn’t clear whether any of the seven people invited to the meeting took any notes about what they discussed, since the government was unable to provide anything when I asked about this.

In refusing to respond to my requests, officials offered a range of excuses such as claiming they were unable to print out the calendar appointments of their own staff or saying it would be too much of a burden to retrieve email correspondence between their staff and the lobbyists unless I agreed to scale back my requests to emails on a single topic within a date range of less than 12 months.

The latter excuse would have made it very difficult for anyone to uncover how oil and gas lobbyists had put a 132-item wishlist as a top priority on the government’s agenda, as my colleagues Carl Meyer and Drew Anderson reported last year. It also provides a twisted and Orwellian interpretation of a section of Alberta’s transparency law that says requests “must provide enough detail to enable the public body to identify the record.”

That’s because under this new interpretation, a member of the public might be required to file hundreds of requests in order to discover any of the emails that listed everything the industry pressured the government to adopt.