Liberal Leader Mark Carney makes a campaign stop at Algoma Steel Inc. in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., on Friday, April 25, 2025.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Liberal Leader Mark Carney said Friday that he would commit to a review of Ottawa’s beleaguered access to information regime.
After a speech in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., Mr. Carney was asked about his position on the government’s policy, which was not mentioned in his party’s platform.
“Yes, it’s not in the platform – it’s in my head,” Mr. Carney said. “I will now, against the advice of my advisers, let it out of my head.
“I think looking at access to information is quite important. The speed with which the information is provided, the redactions – I’m happy to commit to having a review of that, because I do find that, at least as an outsider until now, and as a consumer of it, that I can’t always follow the process,” he said.
“An objective review of that would serve Canadians well, regardless of the result of the election.”
Ottawa’s access to information system was a focus of Secret Canada, a Globe and Mail investigation that examined Canada’s access regimes.
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Access laws – sometimes called freedom of information or right to information legislation – exist in countries around the world and throughout Canada at the federal, provincial, territorial and municipal level.
They enshrine into law the principle that people have a right to know how their public institutions are being run and how tax dollars are being spent. These laws do this by allowing the public to make official requests for documents, which must then be disclosed – with limited exceptions.
In practice, however, Canada’s access regimes are often broken.
The Globe’s examination found that public institutions are routinely breaking access laws by violating statutory time limits, overusing redactions and claiming no records exist when they do. They face few, if any, consequences for ignoring the precedents set by courts and information commissioners, the government-appointed watchdogs responsible for monitoring the system and mediating disputes.
A 2023 Secret Canada audit of FOI requests to federal, provincial and territorial ministries found that they managed to complete only half of their requests within 30 days. (By default, most jurisdictions require a file to be completed within this time frame, though FOI laws allow for time extensions in certain circumstances.)
In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024, federal institutions violated their legislated timelines on access requests roughly 30 per cent of the time, according to statistics published by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.
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After The Globe’s investigation, Canada’s information commissioners – the top civil servants responsible for overseeing public bodies’ compliance with access laws – signed a joint resolution calling on federal, provincial and territorial governments to modernize access laws. They had signed a similar pact in 2019.
Mr. Carney’s proposed review would be far from the first.
In 2023, a House of Commons committee prepared a 99-page report with 38 recommendations on Canada’s access law. In a response signed by then-Treasury Board president Anita Anand, the government declined to act on the recommendations, and said it would instead focus on the system’s “operational and administrative challenges.”
During the 2015 federal election campaign, then-Liberal leader 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.
Canada’s access law, the Access to Information Act, has a mandatory review mechanism. The next review is scheduled to begin later this year.
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Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, called Mr. Carney’s promise to review access law “weak and too little, too late.” He said he hopes the winning party will undertake a “meaningful review and close the huge secrecy loopholes in the law and strengthen enforcement.”
In a news release on Friday, Democracy Watch criticized all of the major national parties for failing to include substantial democratic reform pledges in their platforms.
Mr. Carney was also asked during his campaign stop about whether he would strengthen the federal government’s ethics regime.
“I think that I would distinguish between the rules and the conduct,” he said. “If there are specific proposals, obviously we would look at them, but what’s important is bringing that spirit of the highest integrity – I think my track record is consistent with that.”