Earlier this week, Justin Trudeau proposed to strengthen the Access to Information Act and to extend it to include ministers' offices, which, currently it does not. Yesterday Andrew MacDougall weighed in, wondering if Trudeau is “nuts.” There is a serious dispute here over governance styles and it merits attention, so let's take a closer look.First, I want to note, as does MacDougall, that Trudeau's proposal doesn't extend to Cabinet, where closed-door discussions can and should continue. The question is whether staffers in ministers' offices and the PMO should enjoy the same privilege.MacDougall, a former director of communications in Stephen Harper's PMO, is adamant that they should. A staffer's role, he argues, “is to help implement the government's agenda, and that involves scrutinizing what your departments put forward as first drafts of those policies.” Secrecy turns out to be essential to the job. Why?Policymaking is a high-pressure environment with little time for niceties, he tells us. Often staffers must have knock-down, drag-out battles to sort out priorities. Trudeau's brand of openness would put an end to this by forcing these discussions into the public realm, and policy would be the worse for it.Lastly, MacDougall claims the “policy crowd” will back up his views, though, oddly, he never tells us who this crowd is or why they'd agree with him. Instead, he jumps directly to telling us how discussions between staffers in ministers' offices are sometimes very hard hitting. I'll come back to this, but first a few other things.For starters, no one is saying that private conversations are forbidden. Even under the most rigorous access to information law, privacy, security, commercial interests, and so on will continue to be protected. There is still lots of room here for frank backroom discussions on related issues.As for MacDougall's claim that difficult discussions won't get aired in public, this is just false. I've been in the policymaking business for 25 years; and I've run open policy processes with all three levels of government, in every part of the country, and with stakeholders of every sort.In my experience, citizens, elected officials and stakeholders are all quite willing to vet their differences in public, as long as they believe the process is fair and everyone is playing by the same rules. When that is the case, they will make a serious effort to work together to arrive at shared solutions through reasonable accommodation of their differences. Such processes can work—I have seen many successful examples—but transparency is always a key condition.However, when there is a lack of transparency, people tend to get suspicious and they are reluctant to speak openly and frankly. If they start to suspect that the real discussion is going on somewhere else—say, among staffers in the backrooms—they will quickly conclude the process is a sham and start playing games of their own to try and take back some control.And that, I think, gets to the heart of the issue here. The Harper government's resistance to transparency has more to do with preserving leverage than ensuring frank conversations. What MacDougall fails to mention is how the government uses political staffers to advance positions that otherwise would not withstand public scrutiny (think of some of its crime bills), to drown out voices with which it disagrees (such as the debates over C-51), or to browbeat the public service (such as getting rid of the long-form census).This gives us quite a different picture of the staffers' role. In this view, policymaking is basically a power game and staffers are the enforcers who are often called on to get the government's dirty work done in the backrooms. I think the real goal of stronger access laws around ministers' offices is, first and foremost, to prevent this kind of bullying.As for the “policy crowd” that MacDougall claims will support his views, if he means stakeholders, academic experts and bureaucrats, everything I've heard runs in the other direction. They are deeply offended by this kind of governance style.Which brings me back to MacDougall's principal argument that officials from the PMO and other ministers' offices often need to engage in knock-down, drag-out fights to arrive at the best policies. I'm surprised at his candor here. I take this as a frank, if unwitting, admission from a consummate insider of just how centralized, top-down and unaccountable the federal policy process has become.In Westminster government, big policy trade-offs are not supposed to be negotiated by ministerial staffers through email exchanges. They are arrived at through public debates, parliamentary committees and discussions around the Cabinet table. If a stronger Access to Information law has the effect of shutting down this new-found policy role for staffers, then I regard that as an excellent point in its favour. An insider like MacDougall may be unable to imagine a viable alternative, but a lot of us on the outside have no trouble at all.In sum, I think the backroom approach MacDougall defends is fast becoming a dysfunctional anachronism. Stakeholders who don't get to be in the backrooms no longer trust it, and those who are at the table often feel they have been bullied into submission. As a result, there is a growing consensus among the “policy crowd” that federal policy processes are usually rigged from the start and therefore utterly lacking in legitimacy.So, MacDougall can try his best to convince us that we are better off with the devil we know, but I think most Canadians have seen enough to know better. Real change can be unsettling, but it is long overdue and I think they are ready for it.Dr. Don Lenihan is Senior Associate, Policy and Engagement, at Canada 2020, Canada's leading, independent progressive think-tank. Don is an internationally recognized expert on democracy and Open Government. His recent projects include chairing an expert group on citizen engagement for the UN and the OECD; and chairing the Ontario Open Government Engagement Team. The views expressed here are those of the columnist alone. Don can be reached at: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at: @DonLenihan