OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper has done a complete about-face, introducing plans that would increase government secrecy after campaigning on openness, says Canada's information czar.

The proposed Accountability Act, now being debated in the House of Commons, will actually make government less accountable when it comes to making information available to Canadians, Information Commissioner John Reid said Friday.

In a special report to Parliament, Reid said no government has ever put forward "a more retrograde and dangerous" set of proposals to change the Access to Information Act since the legislation first came into effect in 1983.

The Accountability Act, and other reforms being proposed, will "increase the government's ability to cover up wrongdoing, shield itself from embarrassment and control the flow of information to Canadians," says the scathing report.

Earlier this month, the Harper government released proposals to reform the Access to Information Act by including more government entities under its umbrella, and by turning over to a Commons committee another set of suggested reforms.

But the Accountability Act, which would add another 19 entities to be covered by Access to Information, also creates 10 new loopholes that would allow civil servants to deny requests for information, says the report.

The proposed legislation, for example, would prevent draft audits or audit papers from being released for 15 years. Currently, there is no such wholesale exemption.

And the proposed reforms to be examined by a Commons committee also fail to deal with fundamental problems, Reid said, such as requiring civil servants to create records, and giving the information commissioner more investigative powers.

Reid noted that while in opposition, Harper railed against the Liberals for failing to reform a system that encouraged civil servants to withhold information and allowed abuses such as the sponsorship scandal to flourish undetected.

But the Tories are now guilty of the same abusive behaviour as they try to make government less transparent, he said.

"The new government has done exactly the things for which its predecessor had been ridiculed," says the report.

For a $5 application fee, Canadian residents can request government information, but the system has been widely criticized for delays and excessive exemptions. More than 20,000 requests are filed each year.