Canada's armed forces have a unique policy of openness and accessibility, implemented in 1998 to restore flagging public confidence in the country?s military after a series of debilitating public relations failures in the mid-1990s. These were largely the result of incidents of bad behaviour among troops on a UN deployment in 1992. Although the policy is welcome, it has not removed some of the old difficulties which reporters typically experience when trying to get information from government departments.