OTTAWA — Federal Fisheries and Oceans Minister Gail Shea has told Parliament that her department discarded up to 84,000 items from seven libraries across the country, spending nearly $23,000 in what it has described as a “culling” process.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada is one of more than a dozen federal departments shutting down libraries and converting documents into digital formats. Government officials have said the goal was to reduce public spending while improving access to reference materials.
But in a document tabled Monday, Shea said her department wasn’t tracking all the details of its efforts to save electronic copies of materials prior to their disposal.
“The Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ systems do not enable us to determine the number of items digitized by location and category,” said a statement signed by Shea in response to questions raised by Liberal MP Lawrence MacAulay.
Shea said on Jan. 7 that users would “continue to have completely free access to every item in DFO’s collections,” and that her department would preserve all materials for which it had copyright.
“Users of these libraries clearly prefer to access its information digitally, which the Department of Fisheries and Oceans can accommodate while also saving taxpayers money,” Shea had said in a statement. “It is absolutely false to insinuate that any books were burnt.”
The department has estimated in a previously released internal document obtained by Postmedia News that it would save about $443,000 in the 2014-15 fiscal year through a process of shutting down its libraries and “culling materials” from the closed locations.
In the newly released information, Shea said her department spent money to discard materials from its St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick ($8,685), the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s, N.L. ($11,810,76), the Maurice Lamontagne Institute Library in Mont-Joli, Que. ($400) and the Mere Juliette Library, in Moncton, N.B. ($1,921).
“What’s going on is thousands and thousands of pieces of material, that were without a doubt valuable, are gone,” MacAuley, a Liberal from Prince Edward Island, said in an interview Thursday. “Are they (in government) trying to prevent some scientific information from coming forward? Is it to make sure that it doesn’t get in the way of certain (industrial) projects that they have in mind? I don’t know.”
Earlier this week, Green Leader Elizabeth May alleged that the process violated federal legislation on record-keeping that requires the government to get consent from the head of Library and Archives Canada prior to discarding any material.
“This strikes me as black-and-white illegal,” May said on Monday. “This is not the Conservative Party’s library to throw on the dumpster. This belongs to Canadians and we have a right to ensure that it’s been properly reviewed.”
Shea said in the statement Monday that the department attempted to give away some of the materials to local libraries, universities or research institutions, but didn’t know how much was saved, or discarded in five out of seven libraries.
The Eric Marshall Aquatic Research Library in Winnipeg reported giving 187 out of 2,820 materials to library services outside of government, while the Maurice Lamontagne Institute Library in Quebec was able to offer 34 out of 194 materials that were to be discarded, according to Shea’s response to MacAulay.
Three libraries in Atlantic Canada — in Moncton, N.B., St Andrews, N.B., and St. John’s, N.L. — may have discarded about 80,000 materials, Shea’s statement said.
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