Any Canadian journalist will tell you that prying information out of governments at all levels is hard enough as it is: our freedom-of-information (also known as FOI or ATIP) laws are easily, and often, circumvented. There are exemptions aplenty and very little oversight. Penalties for breaking the law by improperly withholding or destroying records are severe but never — truly never, as in, not once — enforced. 

Freedom-of-information laws allow anyone to ask a government for any document it produces, like emails and memos, invoices and contracts, even handwritten sticky notes. The laws are imperfect; they allow for fees that can add up fast, into the thousands of dollars. They also have exemptions that prevent, say, investigative materials or national security secrets from being turned over, but those exemptions are also subject to abuse. Legislated timelines are routinely flouted at all levels. 

Despite their built-in weaknesses, FOI laws are fundamental to investigative reporting. As Canada's National Observer’s Cloe Logan reported this week, major stories like the Greenbelt scandal, the Skills Development Fund scandal and the gas plants scandal that toppled the previous government were only possible because of Ontario’s FOI law. To be more precise, they were only possible because of the specific application of FOI laws that the Ford government is trying to exempt itself from. Following the passage of the changes the premier has put forward, the kind of reporting that has dogged the Ford government from one corruption scandal to another will be even harder — meaning, in effect, even rarer. 

This is a disaster for accountability in a province that desperately needs more of it. 

And the Ford government is not alone in doing this. In BC, where I’ve personally gone through the ringer trying to wrench loose documents that suggested political games were being played around old-growth logging during the Fairy Creek era, the NDP government is also granting itself new leeway in determining which records requests to obey and which to ignore. That’s after the same government already undermined FOI laws once before, in 2021, winning it the “Code of Silence Award” from the Canadian Association of Journalists. 

In Alberta, a two-year investigation in 2025 by the arm’s-length information watchdog found the province had been systematically violating the law (and by extension, its citizens’ right to know) for years. A month later, Danielle Smith’s UCP changed the law and loosened the rules for itself. 

Governments may be closing their grip on their internal information, but they certainly aren’t so parsimonious with ours. On Thursday, Rory White reported that the House of Commons had nearly unanimously passed a law that gives political parties the ability to violate provincial privacy laws in collecting and retaining information about voters. (The sole dissenting voice was the Green Party, with Elizabeth May calling it a “scandalous abuse of omnibus budget bills.”) Oh, and the exemption is retroactive 26 years, for some troublingly unknown reason that suggests past violations we’ll never know about. 

It’s hard to make people care about this stuff, particularly when gas prices are spiking because of a brand-new war, our neighbour keeps hinting at plans to swallow our country and a thousand other pressing matters bear down on us every day. But freedom of information laws are one of those bricks underlying our democracy that we simply can’t allow to be knocked loose by self-interested governments. 

Gutting these laws is a non-partisan, equal-opportunity scandal that should capture the attention of anyone who deals with the government in any manner, which is all of us. Your government, no matter the stripe, works for you — and you have a right to know why they make decisions, spend money and listen to some voices and not others. 

© National Observer