You can run it through a scanner, but you can't hide

A four-month old report containing recommendations on beefing up St. John's City Council's conflict of interest rules was finally posted on Wednesday, deep within the bowels of the City's website, and without any obvious link near the top of that site's navigation, after it was leaked.

Volume I — where's Volume II? — of the report by former Premier and Chief Justice Clyde Wells is intitled "Report to St. John's City Council on Recommended Adjustments to The City's Existing Ethical Conduct Legislation".

The report is fairly hefty and, for those interested in such matters, quite fascinating and eye-opening.

The reaction of City Council, of course, is to freak out about the fact that this document, dated September 2015, ever got before the public's eye in the first place.

The cat being out of the bag, the folks in New Gower Street decided they might as well post the report to the internet for computers. Despite being "born digital", the document was, naturally, printed off, then run through a scanner before being posted as a PDF.

A non-textual PDF.

Since it only takes a few seconds to convert a non-textual PDF to much more useful textual one, this corner has taken it upon itself to rectify this obviously inadvertent oversight on the part of the very open and transparent municipal government in St. John's. Here you go, OCR errors excepted.

Wells Report