I spent 12 years working as a reporter, editor, photographer, human resources manager, public relations specialist, marketing advisor, therapist and delivery truck driver for a newspaper in Rocky Mountain House. You learn a lot in 12 years.

One of the most popular sections of the Rocky paper was court news; we had one reporter dedicated to covering criminal court every week. Criminal court, in my experience, tends to be similar in every Alberta community, and that ranges from towns of 1,000 to cities of 85,000.

Our paper was rather popular, and the court news was, as I noted, one of the most popular sections. People in the community wanted to know what certain people were up to.

Those who appeared in court knew very well that their name and exploits were about to be publicized throughout the region. One of the Rocky RCMP commanders even told me they’d heard from people under arrest that the accused didn’t really care about criminal problems but was worried about his name appearing in the newspaper.

Your provincial government for many years now has been obsessed with freedom of information and protection of privacy. I’m not necessarily saying I have a problem with either feature of our society, but I am a journalist and have been one my entire adult life. Journalists tend to support freedom of speech very strongly. We also tend to support the public’s right to know what’s going on behind the government's closed doors and what’s being done, or not done, with taxpayer money.

I’ve noticed privacy legislation becoming more and more prevalent in government, including local municipalities and school boards. One area stands out.

In the past if certain taxpayers stiffed a municipality for property taxes, the public would find out. The topic would be discussed openly at a council meeting (as it rightly should) and the public would know which of their neighbours wasn’t paying their bills. If these people, organizations, oil and gas companies or corporations wanted special treatment such as forgiveness of their property tax bill, they’d have to come to council, speak in the public forum and make their case. Regardless of what councillors decided at least the public knew what was going on.

That doesn’t appear to be the way such situations are handled anymore. It appears privacy laws now protect scofflaws and deadbeats from public accountability, which doesn’t really surprise me. As I noted above, having your dirty laundry aired publicly in a newspaper must be very embarrassing. There are some parts of our society flush with cash and political influence that obviously use said influence to ensure they no longer have to worry about public embarrassment with the added bonus that they also don’t have to worry about public transparency and accountability.

This situation is frustrating to those property owners who pay their bills on time. They obviously understand that most municipalities aren’t rolling in cash and need those property taxes to provide vital public services.

Sadly, when some property owners become deadbeats and don’t pay their taxes, others are left to pick up the slack. For example, an oil and gas company that owns seven tax rolls in a large rural municipality and has dozens of employees driving up and down county-owned roads put a lot of wear and tear on taxpayer property. But when that company packs up and leaves town they also leave all the wear they caused to those roads plus tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid taxes. All of us have to cover that oil and gas company’s wear and tear to infrastructure in addition to our own.

In the past all of us taxpayers would have at least known which scofflaw or deadbeat was responsible for our higher tax bills.

But now we don’t even have that.

Stu Salkeld has worked as a reporter and photojournalist in rural Alberta and B.C. for 30 years. Non-scofflaws may contact him at stewartsalkeld7@gmail.com.