Canada’s Information Commissioner, Caroline Maynard, appears as a witness at a Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples at the Senate of Canada Building in Ottawa on Feb. 27.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Federal Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard says the Trudeau government has cut her budget by 5 per cent, a move that will make it even more difficult to press Ottawa for information that Canadians request or to take the government to court.
Ms. Maynard told the House of Commons committee on access to information, privacy and ethics Thursday that the Treasury Board department reduced her budget by $700,000.
“In concrete terms, this represents a significant portion of my overall IT budget or money to cover the costs of defending my orders in court or funding for a full team of investigators,” she said. “Basically this reduction in my budget will spell long delays for complainants who are seeking information from government institutions.”
Ms. Maynard testified that the country’s access-to-information laws have been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada as “quasi-constitutional” in nature, meaning they are almost as important as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“Government information belongs to Canadians so unless there are limitations, exceptions, exclusions, that information should be provided to Canadians,” she said.
Ms. Maynard said she sent a letter last week to the Treasury Board department seeking “immediate redresses from this unacceptable predicament.”
Canada’s access-to-information system, first set up in 1983, has been weighed down by mounting delays, numerous complaints and poor international ratings.
Ms. Maynard said she had to deal with 4,000 complaints last year and currently has 11 active court cases against the federal government.
“Now is not the time for bureaucratic penny-pinching,” she told MPs.
Martin Potvin, a Treasury Board department spokesperson, said the funding cut in operations helps balance recent public service wage hikes that affected 90 organizations across the government.
“There is a standard formula used to increase operating budgets of all organizations in the federal public service for salary increases due to new collective agreements,” he said. “We will continue to discuss with the Information Commissioner and her office the concerns that she has raised in her letter.”
Last June, MPs on the committee on access to information, privacy and ethics published a 99-page report on Canada’s access law, and requested the government formally respond to its 38 recommendations.
In October, Treasury Board President Anita Anand sent a letter to the committee, declining to act on the recommendations.
“Overall, the Government shares many of the Committee’s views noted in its recommendations,” the letter signed by Ms. Anand read. “Having said this, the Government’s current priority is to address the most pressing operational and administrative challenges facing the [access to information] regime.”
The government will review the federal access law in 2025, Ms. Anand promised.
The Globe and Mail’s investigation into the country’s access regimes has revealed that public institutions skirt access laws, also known as freedom-of-information laws, by overusing redactions, failing to meet legislated timelines and claiming “no records” exist when they do. And these institutions face few – if any – consequences for ignoring the precedents set by courts and information commissioners.
The House access committee’s report – the result of 11 public hearings in which parliamentarians heard from 42 witnesses – highlighted the delays faced by those filing access requests, the way in which the federal immigration system has become intertwined with the access regime, issues around access to historical documents and more. The report recommended bringing ministers’ offices under federal access law, limiting time extensions on access requests to 60 days, giving the Information Commissioner of Canada the power to impose fines and establishing the automatic release of historical documents after 25 years.
During the 2015 federal election campaign, the Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau, vowed to make sweeping changes to access to information. Those changes would have included bringing ministers’ offices – including his own – under access law and making the government “open by default.”
Those and other access commitments in the Liberal Party’s 2015 platform were never adopted, though the government eventually made some changes to federal access law as part of Bill C-58, including abolishing all charges for requests beyond the initial $5 filing fee.
The Globe and Mail has set up its own Explore Secret Canada, a database of FOI requests and a resource for learning how to submit your own requests.
With a report from Tom Cardoso and Robyn Doolittle