Queen’s Park, the Ontario provincial legislature, in Toronto.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Patricia Kosseim is the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.
Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) was adopted almost 40 years ago. Everyone agrees it needs updating, both in terms of its privacy protections and the way it provides for access to information. But Friday’s surprise announcement to amend FIPPA is not about modernization. It’s about diminishing Ontarians’ privacy and access rights and weakening government’s accountability to the people they serve.
Among the government’s most alarming proposals is to change FIPPA to prevent Ontarians from accessing government information held by the Premier, cabinet ministers, elected officials, and political staff.
To be crystal clear: FIPPA, like other freedom-of-information laws across the country, already exempts constituents’ personal information and other confidential information from disclosure, including Cabinet confidences. This new amendment would exclude government-related records from FIPPA altogether if they are in the hands of politicians or their staff.
Even more disturbing is that this change would apply retroactively to 1988 – the year Ontario’s freedom-of-information law came into force. Forty years of government records would be placed outside the reach of freedom of information, and beyond any access by Ontarians. That’s not exactly the 40th anniversary celebrations we were planning for.
Ontario to introduce bill exempting Premier, cabinet from FOI requests
The Government of Ontario is currently seeking leave to appeal a court ruling that unanimously upheld my office’s order to produce the entries of call logs from the Premier’s personal cellphone that relate to government business. This is to ensure independent examination to determine whether they may be subject to access under the law. Based on evidence showing that the Premier routinely uses his personal phone to conduct government business, it was considered likely that they are. By proposing this amendment, the government’s message to Ontarians is plain: If oversight bodies don’t interpret existing rules in the government’s favour, it’s time to change the rules.
This stance should concern every Ontarian, regardless of their party affiliation.
Freedom-of-information laws exist to provide Ontarians with information about how government decisions are made, what they are based on, who influences them, and whether the public interest is being served. We already know government business is often conducted outside formal government systems and channels. If records about government business can be shielded from scrutiny simply because they sit in a minister’s office, on a staffer’s device, within a political account or on the Premier’s phone, then public accountability is eviscerated.
There are other troubling elements of the proposed amendments legislation.
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For example, the proposed amendments would diminish my office’s oversight over FIPPA provisions that allow ministries to link records about every Ontarian across all of government, including their health, social, and tax information. When this extraordinary ability to amass and link such large data sets was introduced in 2019, it was clearly conditional on my office having independent oversight to ensure Ontarians’ privacy rights are protected from potential breach or abuse. Now, it seems the government’s got the seven-year itch, and wants to oversee itself.
This isn’t about efficiency. It’s about government avoiding the hard work of holding itself accountable to others and putting robust privacy protections in place when handling Ontarians’ most sensitive personal information in bulk. My office will always stand ready to help support and enable that work.
Another proposal would allow government employees to carry their e-mail accounts with them when they move between ministries. E-mail accounts often contain extremely sensitive information about Ontarians who access government programs and services. Government employees should not be able to access this information once they no longer have a legitimate need to use it for their new job. Keeping and moving around mass amounts of Ontarians’ personal information would increase privacy and security risks exponentially. It would also make freedom-of-information requests more burdensome and expensive to process, as records become more scattered across government and accountability impossible to trace.
As the country’s most populous and influential province, Ontario should be proudly leading the way in protecting the public’s privacy and access rights. In a world of weakening democracies, dwindling confidence in government, and rampant misinformation, Ontario should be working to strengthen privacy and access to information rules, increase transparency, and uphold the integrity of its public institutions through independent oversight. Instead, the provincial government is taking us back to the dark ages.