Thoughts on BC Politics and More

A commentary by a former ­senior associate member of the University of Oxford. British Columbia’s Bill 9 does not remove the right of access to information, but it risks making that right harder to use in ­practice. That should concern anyone who believes government should be answerable to the public, not insulated from it ... ... delays are not, by ­themselves, a reason to ­narrow public rights. More often, they reflect under-resourced access offices, weak records ­management and outdated s­ystems. If government cannot process requests efficiently, the answer is to improve capacity, not reduce accountability ... CLICK HERE for the full story 

Bill-9 could directly restrict how I do my job as an opposition MLA.  Freedom of information is one of the only real tools we have to figure out what government is actually doing behind the scenes. Press releases tell you what the government wants you to hear. The real story lives in briefing notes, internal emails, and reports that only come out when someone forces the government to hand them over. Bill 9 weakens that system. Right now the law says government must respond “without delay.” Bill 9 replaces that with “without unreasonable delay.”  That might sound like a small wording change, but anyone who has dealt with bureaucracy knows exactly what it means: more wiggle room to stall, more excuses, and more waiting while the government runs out the clock. The bill also lets ministries decide whether a request has “enough detail” before they even start looking for records. In other words, the government gets to decide whether your request is good enough to bother answering. ...

Conservative Interim Leader of the Official Opposition and Critic for Citizen Services and Caucus Chair Jody Toor, are calling on the Eby NDP government to withdraw Bill 9, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Act, 2026,warning it will further erode transparency and make it easier for government to hide information from the public. "Bill 9 is out of touch and unaccountable," said Halford.  "After Freedom of Information requests exposed tens of thousands spent on government gift cards, the NDP's response isn't to cancel the gift-card giveaway but to make FOI harder so similar programs don’t get out, that tells you everything about this government's priorities." Bill 9 would expand the grounds government can use to ask the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) to dismiss requests and would add new fees for records that should be proactively disclosed. Halford said Bill 9 fits a growing pattern of the Eby NDP ...

For more than 40 years, we have had a federal law on Access to Information (ATI) to permit the public to ask for government records. Hardly cause for celebration. After well more than 3,000 tries, mostly thwarted, I now view ATI as a different acronym: the government’s Arrogance Toward Inquiries, an Antagonism Targeting Investigators, with Administered Tricks Involved and an Ability To Ignore. I stopped ages ago keeping a running list of the federal records I thought I could obtain under the law that provides me the right to know—turns out, all along it’s been the government’s right to no ... CLICK HERE for the full story  

BC’s information and privacy commissioner is concerned about the number of freedom of information requests going unanswered in the province.  The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia recently took the “unprecedented step” of obtaining a court order to force a provincial health authority to respond to a freedom of information or FOI request, commissioner  Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner told The Tyee ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Last summer, when The Tyee learned about BC’s secretive plan to tighten its response to protests in the province, we had questions. Nearly six months later — and only after filing and receiving a freedom of information request — we finally received an answer. Dozens of internal emails The Tyee received in response to its FOI request provide a behind-the-scenes look at how a reporter’s questions quickly reached top officials and triggered a carefully strategized response from a communications team, only to be withheld from the public. Sean Holman, the Wayne Crookes professor in environmental and climate journalism at the University of Victoria, said the province’s refusal to respond to media questions — which are asked on behalf of the public — smacks of creeping authoritarianism ... CLICK HERE for the full story

An RCMP report, “Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada,” was recently made public by CBC after Matt Malone, an assistant law professor at Thompson Rivers University, received it through a freedom of information request. Malone is the founder of the Open by Default project at the Investigative Journalism Foundation, which posts over 20,000 documents acquired by freedom of information requests. Frustratingly, the report is almost entirely redacted, even though it was supposedly compiled from open sources by the RCMP’s Strategic Foresight and Methodology Team in 2022. The scraps of the report that remain deal with six issues ... CLICK HERE for the full story

. . . . only a few months later, before any ­vaccines were developed, let alone available, and immediately before the inevitable second wave of infection, the NDP called a snap election. It later came to my attention that in the early days of the pandemic, the NDP government began using our tax dollars, and quite a lot of them, to poll British Columbians with an eye on determining whether the fear percolating around the world at the time might provide a ­political opportunity for the NDP to get its coveted majority. Polling questions are nothing more than questions asked of the public so I assumed they would be readily provided on my request . . . . CLICK HERE for the full story

It’s been just over two years since the BC NDP government passed Bill 22, a controversial rewriting of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The bill brought in major changes to the FOI and privacy regime in this province, some positive (penalties for destroying records related to an FOI request) but many negative (imposing an application fee for the first time, eliminating the requirement for domestic data storage). The timing of the bill was also controversial. The government rushed it through in the fall of 2021. This was despite the fact a special committee of the legislature had already been established in June 2021 to carry out a review of the FOI and privacy legislation as required by law ... CLICK HERE for the full story