This has not been a good spring for Canadian librarians and archivists, especially those who work at federal libraries and archives, which are being de-funded and dismantled by federal budget cuts. These information centres sustain government and public research capacity. Their ability to create, preserve, and provide access to public information in our country is at risk.

These cuts, and the centres and programmes in jeopardy, include:

• April 13, 2012 – Publishing and Depository Services (i.e., Publications Canada, DSP) announces that beginning in 2014, it will no longer publish government information in print format, which ostensibly “aligns with the Government of Canada’s greening government initiatives” [PDF] but in practice jeopardizes access to government information in public and academic libraries from coast to coast.
• April 13, 2012 – Statistics Canada announces that it will formally close E-STAT in 2013 [PDF].  This is acceptable in most quarters since CANSIM statistics are now free for public use on StatCan’s website, but many librarians are appropriately wondering what the decline of this relatively easy-to-use socio-economic database and its simplified outputting functions for charts and tables means for teachers, students, and first-time users of statistics.
• May 1, 2012 (as reported) – Statistics Canada, facing a a budget shortfall of nearly 10% “due to a mix of budget cuts and a plunge in revenue as other federal departments“, tells half of their workforce of 5,000 people that their employment is at risk. The Montreal Gazette reports, by way of a videotaped address by the Chief Statistician, that three-quarters of StatCan’s “savings would come from cutting programs, meaning fewer surveys, less data and less analysis.“
• April 30, 2012 – Funding is withdrawn from the National Archival Development Program (NADP) [PDF] and the Canadian Council of Archives is shuttered.  Click here for immediate reaction to this event.
• April 30th, 2012 – Library and Archives Canada (LAC) gives notices to nearly half of its workforce of 544 librarians; nearly 20% are expected to lose their positions outright. The professional community later learns that the InterLibrary Loan programme at LAC will close on February 13, 2013, severely hampering the transfer of documents and research knowledge to and from Ottawa.
• April 5, 2012 – Industry Canada formally cancels C@P, the Community Access Programme to the Internet [PDF]. [Read the letter via savecap.ca]
• May 2, 2012 (as reported) – Librarians and library services at federal departments, including Citizenship and Immigration, Agriculture, Environment, Industry, Transport Canada, National Defence, Public Works and Government Services, the National Capital Commission, and the Public Service Commission are given notice. This action jeopardizes the departments’ research capacity and their ability to access their own reports and products.

I’m missing some announcements since I was away when so many of these cuts were announced, but this list nonetheless clarifies the seriousness of the situation. In the space of a few weeks, the federal government has severely hampered the nation’s ability to gather, document, use, and disseminate government and cultural information.

You can learn what many of these cuts mean in clear, practical terms by reading this post written by my archivist friend, Creighton Barrett, at Dalhousie University’s Archives and Special Collections.  Creighton explains how these cuts negatively affect the university’s ability to collect and maintain the records used by scholars and citizens in one community alone, and rightly notes that they are a “devastating” blow to information access in Canada. Now, consider how Creighton’s list grows when you add to it the ways in which these same cuts affect the libraries and archives in your own community, and then all other libraries and archives in Canada. And we haven’t even touched what these broader cuts mean for LAC’s programming and resources, StatCan programming, and the research capacity of federal departments and agencies. “Devastating,” may well be an understatement in the long run.

These budget cuts are a knock-out punch to how public information is accessed and used across the country. The cuts not only affect the library community and possibly your civil-service-friend who lives down the road. They will affect the manner in which our society is able to find and use public information.  If public data is no longer collected (see StatCan), preserved (see LAC, NADP, CCA), disseminated and used (see PDS/DSP and cuts at departmental libraries), then does the information even exist in the first place? There will be less government and public information, fewer means to access this information, and fewer opportunities to do so.

Take a moment and recall the freedom you have been afforded to speak freely in this nation.  The utility of that freedom is dependent on your ability to access the information you use to learn, to criticize, to praise, or to condemn.  If knowledge is power, then a public whose national information centres and access points are ill-funded is a weakling. Libraries and archives provide Canadians with direct access to key government information, and for that very reason, they should be funded to the hilt.

This is where I get to my point: We are now facing a situation in Canada where government information has suddenly become far more difficult to collect, to access, and to use. The funding cuts that Canada’s libraries and archives face is an affront to the proper functioning of a contemporary democratic society. These cuts will impede the country’s ability to access public and government information, which will make it difficult for Canadians to criticize government practices, past and present.

I mentioned on Twitter that these cuts show us that the work of librarians and archivists are crucial to the nation’s interest. We are not mere record keepers, and neither do we spend our days merely dusting cobwebs off of old books. We are the people who maintain collections of public information, and we are the people who provide and nurture access to information. Many of us see ourselves as guardians of the public’s right to access information.  If we take on that guardianship, then we must defend and protect these collections and access points. I’m not talking about a Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 job. I’m talking about advocacy, which doesn’t have an on/off switch. Either you do it or you don’t.

So, what should you do? Get informed, speak up, and act.  Write letters to the editor. Write to your professional associations and other like-minded organizations; lend them your support, and when needed, tell them to add force to their own statements. Write to your MPs, to other MPs (especially to MPs who sit on government benches), to cabinet members, and to the PMO. When you’re socializing with friends who aren’t librarians and archivists, mention how our work affects their work and their personal lives. Massive cuts to the nation’s libraries and archives do not serve the public good. These cuts may help balance the financial books, but they create an information deficit that inhibits research, stymies dialogue and criticism, and makes government more distant from the people.