An Indigenous couple’s remains, repatriated to Canada six years ago, have yet to find a final resting place because their “spiritual belongings” are being held by museums in the United Kingdom.

Six objects associated with Demasduit and Nonosabasut, among the last of the Beothuks of Newfoundland, are being retained by the National Museums Scotland and by the British Museum.

“Repatriating their spiritual belongings is a critical step towards peacefully laying Demasduit and Nonosabasut to rest in their final resting place,” Tony Wakeham, premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, wrote earlier this year.

Wakeham’s comment is from a March 27 letter to federal Heritage Minister Marc Miller, asking for Ottawa’s help in returning the six objects to Canada, including a container made of birch bark, spruce root and seal fat.

A copy of the letter and related documents, heavily redacted, were obtained under the Access to Information Act. They can be downloaded here:

Beothuk briefing package

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The couple’s remains were looted from a central Newfoundland gravesite in the late 1820s, shortly before the Beothuks were declared extinct – a case of genocide by European colonizers, according to some historians.

The couple’s skulls and burial objects were removed by explorer William Epps Cormack from graves at Beothuk Lake (previously Red Indian Lake), most of which wound up in a Scottish museum.

In 2017, the Canadian government formally requested the return of the skulls and associated objects. The National Museums Scotland partially acceded, and the remains were transferred in 2020 to the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, and later to the care of The Rooms, a museum, archives and art gallery, in St. John’s, N.L.

But the “spiritual belongings” were held back in the absence of a clear repatriation policy for artefacts held by the Scottish institution. An updated policy was created in 2025, “which may now make it possible for the associated objects to be repatriated to Canada,” says a memorandum to Miller.

Miller wrote to Wakeham in April that the federal government “would be pleased to assist again in facilitating the return of these spiritual belongings,” and that his officials would begin discussions. The U.K. institutions require national governments to make formal requests in repatriation cases.

The process this time will be more complicated because the sought-after artefacts are held in two places, the Scottish facility in Edinburgh and the British Museum in London. Three birch-bark containers of similar manufacture and a small model canoe are in Scotland, while a birch-bark bowl and vessel are held in London.

Miller was cautioned not to expect quick results.

“There are no binding international treaties that require the repatriation of Indigenous cultural belongings and ancestral remains,” says the memo. “Repatriation of artefacts from abroad is often a lengthy process. … There can be significant costs associated with repatriation, including travel and transportation.”

Five Indigenous groups in Newfoundland and Labrador jointly represent the interests of the extinct Beothuk people, and all are members of the Final Resting Place Circle, created in 2023 to recommend a final interment of the remains. The group is also pressing for the return of the spiritual objects.

CBC reported in 2022 that the provincial government is considering creating a $250,000 cultural centre at Beothuk Lake to eventually hold the remains.

Demasduit, called Mary March by European settlers, was kidnapped by a fur trapper in March 1819. Nonosabasut was killed later that year as he attempted to free his wife. Demasduit died in 1820 and was buried on her ancestral lands at Beothuk Lake alongside her husband.

The couple were aunt and uncle to Shanawdithit, a Beothuk woman who was captured by Europeans in 1823 and died in 1829 in St. John’s, N.L. She is regarded as the last of the Beothuks.

The name tags that RCMP officers are required to wear for identification no longer have to display their actual names, a move intended to protect them from digital bad actors.

In a significant amendment to the Mounties’ Uniform Dress Manual, regular members now can choose to display only their regimental numbers rather than their names.

The policy revision came into effect on March 30, designed as a safety measure to prevent officers from becoming public targets, especially through doxxing by malicious persons who expose private information such as home addresses.

“The change responds to increasing member safety concerns, including doxxing, online harassment, and off duty targeting,” says a briefing note to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree.

A copy of the April 27, 2026, note, signed by RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme, was obtained under the Access to Information Act. The redacted document can be downloaded here:

RCMP name tags

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So-called numeric name tags had previously been banned outright in the RCMP except for duties related to the policing of protests, and then only with approval from senior officers. Name tags are worn on the upper right side of the RCMP uniform, typically above the shirt pocket.

Identification tags bearing officers’ names have also been standard in many Canadian police forces as a measure of accountability, so that citizens can identify officers involved in policing interactions.

But last year, the Calgary Police Service launched a pilot program that removed officers’ last names from uniforms and replaced them with badge numbers, which must always be visible. Calgary officers could share their names voluntarily with citizens only if they felt safe in doing so. Doxxing was cited as a potential threat.

The new RCMP policy requires either the name or the regimental number, at the officer’s discretion. Some units, such as the Yukon RCMP, have already rolled out the new protocol.

Some RCMP members have reported receiving death threats, including against their families, after their names and cellphone numbers were leaked on social media, especially during the 2022 convoy protests at border points and in Ottawa.

There have also been instances of municipal police officers pulling off their identification badges during certain policing operations. In 2021, there were allegations that officers with the Halifax Regional Police tasked with clearing a homeless encampment had removed their name tags. And in 2010, Toronto’s then-police chief Bill Blair said 90 officers faced disciplinary actions for removing name tags during the G20 summit protests.

The briefing note says the new RCMP name-tag policy will not affect accountability. “Members will continue to be required to wear a visible, unique identifier when interacting with the public; public complaint and oversight processes remain unchanged.”

But the document also acknowledges the new policy may reduce trust. “There is a risk that some stakeholder may perceive numeric identifiers as reducing transparency and therefore there are potential impacts on community and Indigenous relations, particularly in small communities,” Duheme told Anandasangaree.

A project to ensure Order of Canada recipients better reflect Canada’s diversity appears to have hit a cultural barrier that could limit Indigenous participation.

Feedback from Indigenous groups suggests many are suspicious of the award’s “deep colonial symbolism,” and accepting it may bring “feelings of discomfort or shame.”

And some Indigenous organizations who were consulted say group achievement is much more important than that of individuals selected for the award.

“Indigenous perspectives often privilege honouring the contributions of communities as a whole, where community and collective impact matter more than individual distinction,” says an internal summary.

“Participants suggested that community-driven nominations could help decolonize and shift the focus away from government authority and toward the recognition of the community itself …”

The Order of Canada, created in 1967, is structured to recognize individual achievement and cannot be awarded to groups or communities. Any group seeking such recognition can do so only by nominating each individual within the community separately, an elaborate process that in the end does not recognize the group itself.

Documents outlining the diversity program were obtained from the Privy Council Office (PCO) under the Access to Information Act. A copy of the full release package can be downloaded here:

Order of Canada diversity project

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PCO declined to answer specific questions about the structural impediment, issuing a statement that said it continues to consult with First Nation, Metis and Inuit individuals and organizations. Two such group consultations were held last December and in March. A report on Indigenous and other diversity matters is expected at the end of July.

The diversity project was launched in 2024 after statistics showed the Order of Canada has typically been awarded to older, English-speaking men. Women, the young, recent immigrants, non-English speakers, and some visible-minority groups are under-represented when measured against their numbers in the general population.

Officials at the Privy Council Office are focusing on increasing the number of nominations from under-represented groups by reaching out to specific communities and by removing administrative barriers to submitting nominees. All Order of Canada nominations must come from the public.

Canada’s Indigenous peoples have historically been under-represented in the Order of Canada, though in recent years numbers have climbed. A study by Andrew Griffith found a “significant leap” in Indigenous recipients in 2023, accounting for about 13 per cent of all winners, compared with the five per cent of Canada’s population that is Indigenous.

A spokesperson for the Governor General’s office, which is participating in PCO’s diversity study along with the Rideau Hall Foundation, says 68 Order of Canada appointees have self-identified as Indigenous between 2021 and 2026. (Voluntary self-identification statistics began to be collected only in 2019.)

Julianne Veraldi did not respond when asked whether the 13-member advisory council that selects Order of Canada recipients has been instructed to increase the numbers of Indigenous people receiving the honour. Veraldi said that as a first step, her office has ensured the council itself is diverse, including members with Indigenous background. The council is headed by Richard Wagner, Canada’s chief justice.

In the most recent round of Order of Canada announcements, at least three members of Indigenous groups were honoured: Bishop Andrew Atagotaaluk, the first Inuk diocesan bishop in the Anglican Communion; Verna Caroline Williams, a Nisga’a elder; and Charlie Watt, an Inuit leader.

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Note: Colleague Jim Bronskill at The Canadian Press independently obtained the same PCO file under the Access to Information Act, and wrote about its Indigenous elements here.

The Liberal government in Ottawa is in the middle of a review of the Access to Information Act, required by law every five years. It’s being run by officials at Treasury Board Secretariat, a powerful central agency. So much is happening in Ottawa these days that the exercise is flying below the radar, like a ground-hugging drone.

Unlike the last review, Treasury Board has issued a discussion paper to elicit “focused and streamlined” feedback from the general public.

The 102-day period for outside input ended June 15, though so-called roundtables for select invitees are scheduled for later this year. I’m one of the chosen few, as a longtime user. The roundtables five years ago were largely a waste of time. They resulted in zero legislative reforms.

The new discussion paper is a crock. The agency claims it draws on “previous feedback from various interested parties from 2015 onward,” including agents of Parliament, parliamentary committees, Indigenous partners, academics, journalists and civil society members.

But the paper cherry-picks changes that would make life easier for the bureaucrats who process access-to-information requests, while turning a blind eye to key reforms that could deliver more information, and sooner, to ordinary Canadians. Those recommended reforms have cropped up repeatedly since the 1980s, in more than a dozen independent studies, but they rarely get any traction. See my own brief to Treasury Board on needed reforms here:

ATIA Review Brief

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Caroline Maynard, Canada’s information commissioner, pushed back against Treasury Board in her own submission this month, saying that the government’s latest proposals “do not address many of the longstanding, well-documented problems with the current access to information regime.” Maynard is an independent officer of Parliament, able to speak forthrightly without fear of dismissal.

Journalist Jim Bronskill recently wrote about Maynard’s rebuff, focusing on Treasury Board’s insidious proposal to eliminate government emails, texts and other so-called transitory records from the reach of the Act. Suppressing these records would kneecap journalists, whom the government purports to support. Maynard strongly opposes the move.

Maynard’s submission also exposes a jarring reality gap at Treasury Board, which includes a startling ignorance of court rulings. Some examples of the bureaucrats’ selective disregard of facts:

• The government claims that bots and bad actors are overwhelming the system, and therefore need to be barred as vexatious. Maynard: “I am not aware of any evidence that bots are making access requests or that bad actors are using digital tools to flood access systems.”

• The government wants to allow time extensions when departments are too busy to respond within legislated deadlines. Maynard: “Case law has already established that resource constraints should not limit access rights …” Allowing such extensions could be used “to justify under-resourcing institutions’ access to information offices.”

• The government wants to put requests on hold while it clarifies a request. Maynard: “I have taken the position that when a request is unclear … the clock has not started yet. Thus, in my view there is no need to put a request on hold or claim a time extension to clarify a request …”

• The government suggests adding a “public interest” override to allow otherwise exempted information to be released. Maynard: Public interest must already be considered when bureaucrats decide whether to release records under discretionary exemptions. “It is therefore unclear what practical effect this proposal would have …”

• The government proposes to allow factual information to be released when it is found in records otherwise exempted because they contain advice. Maynard: “... this will have little practical effect as this interpretation has already been affirmed in jurisprudence.”

• The government wants to compel the commissioner to conduct more mediations and to issue fewer orders. Maynard: The proposal “appears to rest on a misunderstanding of how investigations are already conducted,” which include significant mediation.

• The government wants to establish standard criteria to justify the orders the commissioner does issue. Maynard: The proposal “appears to be based on misconceptions as to how I report my findings.” Her database of decisions “appears to have been overlooked.”

Misunderstanding. Misconceptions. Little practical effect. Overlooked. Case law already established. These words are signs of a broken or non-existent dialogue. Of a department comfortably siloed.

Maynard says she was not consulted about the proposals in the discussion paper. (She first saw an internal draft in the fall, when I sent it to her after receiving a redacted copy under the Access to Information Act.) There was also no early consultation with her office for the major reforms to the Act back in 2019.

And the paper is devoid of the reforms demanded by users for decades, which include loosening cabinet confidence rules and giving access to records in ministers’ offices. So the review is another inside job, run by bureaucrats attending to their own difficulties, engaging in consultation-washing and box-ticking, dismissing reality and resisting transparency. A disturbing case of freedom of information’s two solitudes.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s own department, the Privy Council Office (PCO), has become the bad boy of freedom of information in Canada.

That’s the clear message of a new report from Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard, the independent officer of Parliament who polices the system.

Maynard’s annual report for 2025-26, released last week, singles out PCO as the next-to-worst of some 265 federal institutions for their compliance with the legal requirements of the Access to Information Act.

She issued 63 orders against PCO last year compelling officials to disclose information they had improperly withheld from requesters, a record for the department and a clear indicator of trouble. That number is a steep rise from 25 orders in 2023-24 and 42 in 2024-25.

Only National Defence scored worse last year, racking up 67 such orders. But Maynard was complimentary in her latest report, arguing National Defence has cleaned up its act and is on track for a much better performance in the next year.

She also applauded Library and Archives Canada for mopping up their access-to-info mess. The agency dramatically reduced the number of orders against it to 16 last year, from 104 just two years ago, when it was by far the worst performer across government.

But Maynard was sharply critical of PCO, whose performance she noted has been in a years-long, steep decline. The bad outcomes have persisted despite her warning letter to Carney shortly after the April election last year, and despite a personal meeting with Michael Sabia, clerk of the Privy Council, on Nov. 12.

“As a Central Agency with the essential role of supporting the Prime Minister and Cabinet … PCO ought to demonstrate a clear and sustained commitment to transparency and the timely processing of access to information requests,” Maynard chided in last week’s report.

Maynard cited other metrics attesting to PCO’s shoddy performance. For example, of all the requester complaints lodged against PCO last year, her investigations concluded that 28 per cent were well-founded – compared with an average of only 8.6 per cent for all other institutions.

So what’s going awry inside Carney’s department?

Maynard says that in the case of historical records requested under the Act, PCO relies heavily on consultations with other departments, which pushes responses well beyond legal deadlines. Excessive consultations are a system-wide flaw with access to information but the problem appears to be more deep-rooted at PCO.

More importantly, PCO does not sufficiently delegate authority to the person in charge of access to information and privacy, that is, ATIP Co-ordinator David Neilson. Rather, Carney has delegated authority broadly to the clerk and other senior officials, largely cutting out Neilson and making the signoff for request releases “cumbersome.”

“This level of control increases the time and complexity of investigations,” said Maynard, who has pressed Sabia to institute proper delegation, apparently to no avail.

The centralization hobbling access-to-information at PCO mirrors a general increase in political power at the centre of government over many years, sidelining ministers and strictly controlling public messaging. So perhaps it’s not surprising to see centralization at work in the administration of access to information, where one embarrassing document can rip holes in a government’s carefully wrought agenda.

Maynard’s efforts to bring PCO into compliance with the Act, including her increasing use of orders, are very much needed – but may be backfiring.

A government discussion paper released in March suggested Maynard has been issuing orders too frequently. “The increase of orders is becoming challenging for institutions to manage,” warns the document. Instead, it argues, the commissioner should be mediating rather than issuing orders so often. In doing so, she should consider whether an institution “did its best to respond to the request,” among other pro-bureaucracy considerations.

In other words, the government could quickly reduce the number of orders slapped against PCO simply by handcuffing the commissioner’s ability to issue them. Presto, chango, problem solved.

Maynard has rebutted, saying that mediation is already integral to her investigations, and orders are “a measure of last resort.” Forcing further mediation or negotiation would only exacerbate delays and “risk eroding trust in both the process and government institutions.”

We’re thus witnessing a power struggle over a government’s ability to control the information that citizens need to hold their leaders to account. With an activist, centralizing government enjoying a parliamentary majority, the odds are stacked against citizens.

Secrecy surrounding cabinet documents is so absolute in Canada that critics look to theology and astrophysics for metaphors to describe it.

Federal cabinet records in Canada are treated as “sacred artefacts to be shrouded in mystery for decades, hidden in a black hole beyond the contemplation of judges, commissioners, or citizens.”

That’s the concluding line in a new paper by the legal scholars Yan Campagnolo and Vincent Kazmierski. The professors from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University presented their findings to a Canadian Bar Association session last month.

Their lengthy paper makes compelling arguments that Section 69 of the Access to Information Act, which confers absolute secrecy on cabinet documents for 20 years after their creation, is in fact unconstitutional.

The professors review key legal cases, compare Canada’s secrecy regime with other Westminster-style governments, and probe the evolution of Section 69 to conclude that a constitutional court challenge could – and should – be launched.

Campagnolo is not aware of a current court application, but he and Kazmierski “are both available to provide our perspective and support for any challenge,” he told me.

As the law stands, cabinet records are completely immune from requests under the Access to Information Act for the first two decades. When a government official deems a document as falling under the Section 69 exclusion, that’s pretty much the end of the story.

Canada’s information commissioner, an officer of Parliament, cannot independently review the decision or even inspect the withheld material. Similarly, the courts have no authority to conduct their own review. The records remain hermetically sealed.

Campagnolo has explored this problem previously, notably in his 2021 book Behind Closed Doors: The Law and Politics of Cabinet Secrecy. The new paper with Kazmierski, to be published this summer in the McGill Law Journal (citation below) expands the analysis, and urges limits to Canada’s cabinet secrecy while acknowledging that some records must be withheld to safeguard the collective decision-making process of cabinet.

The paper is keyed to two sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, referring to fundamental freedoms and democratic rights. The analysis can be taxing for non-legal minds (mine), but some elements ring true to experience.

I’ve been refused access-to-info documents thousands of times because they’ve been rubber-stamped as cabinet confidences, under Section 69. I can’t complain to anyone about these refusals, neither the information commissioner nor the courts. The diktats simply can’t be challenged under the law.

Which raises the question: is this unfettered power of bureaucrats to declare documents as cabinet secrets being abused? From my requester perspective, the circle of documents trapped inside this black hole seems to grow wider every year. Are public servants who review my requests ever more inclined to label records as cabinet confidences, safe in the knowledge that their decisions won’t be second-guessed?

The Campagnolo-Kazmierski paper offers evidence that something dubious is indeed going on.

The authors include a statistical table showing that in the three decades between 1990-91 and 2020-21, the government officials increasingly labelled emails and other commonplace records as cabinet confidences when responding to access-to-information requests. Use of this exclusion for these low-level records rose from 30.81 per cent of all exclusions, to 77.32 per cent over the 30-year period.

“These data suggest that the types of documents excluded under section 69 have shifted over the years from official Cabinet documents to other government documents, such as emails and other departmental records, that are only remotely connected to the collective decision-making process,” the authors observe.

So the circle of secrecy does appear to be widening, like the maw of a voracious black hole.

Advocates of transparency have long called for reform of cabinet secrecy in order to restore accountability, while accepting that some cabinet confidences can be legitimately withheld. I reiterated this challenge in a recent brief for the government’s current review of the Access to information Act, available here:

ATIA Review Brief

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Two legal scholars have added their voices, arguing the law offends the Canadian Constitution.

Governments in Ottawa clearly benefit from the unassailable fortress that insulates purported cabinet records from public scrutiny or review. So the job of reform likely falls to the courts – and to civic-minded individuals or organizations willing to take on the Charter challenge.

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Yan Campagnolo & Vincent Kazmierski, “Secret, Not Sacred: Constitutional Limitations on the Protection of Cabinet Confidences under the Access to Information Act” (2026) 71:3 McGill LJ (forthcoming)

Canada’s privacy laws are supposed to protect ordinary citizens from unwarranted intrusions into their personal lives.

But they can also protect pedophiles. Dead pedophiles. Dead pedophiles from America.

Serial child abuser Jeffrey Epstein – convicted and jailed in 2008 for prostitution, including soliciting prostitution from a minor – was allowed to visit Vancouver in 2014, despite his U.S. criminal record.

His travel to Canada was revealed in the millions of documents released by the U.S. Justice Department and reported on by CBC and others.

CBC journalist Mike Crawley wanted to know how Epstein got into the country. He was told by a spokesperson for the responsible agency, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), that “we cannot provide comment on specific cases as a person’s immigration and border information is considered personal information and is protected by the Privacy Act.”

Epstein again sought entry to Canada as a temporary resident, but in 2018 the Government of Canada got it right: our consulate in Los Angeles refused to issue a permit, citing his criminal record. That’s also in the Epstein files, which the U.S. government released with no apparent concern for Epstein’s privacy. (American privacy laws are less restrictive than ours.)

Given the lack of explanation for Epstein’s mysterious 2014 visit to Vancouver, I asked under the Access to Information Act for all CBSA records on the case.

I recently got a response, if you can call it that: “Nothing disclosed.” The agency cited Section 19(1) of the Access to Information Act, which protects the personal information of another individual. You can read the rejection here:

CBSA Epstein

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And so one of the most notorious pedophiles in modern history carries his privacy to the grave, at least in Canada. People are guaranteed privacy for at least 20 years after their death, which means we might not get the full story of Epstein’s sojourn in Vancouver until 2039.

But what’s really being protected here is the government. Someone screwed up. Canada’s immigration minister in 2014, Chris Alexander, told Crawley he knew nothing about the Epstein visit, calling the matter a “serious lapse in immigration enforcement.” And because Epstein’s privacy is being protected, so are the public servants who for whatever reason allowed a convicted pedophile into the country.

Many journalists crash into Fortress Privacy while trying to do their jobs, and many bureaucrats are only too happy to use privacy as a shield for their decisions.

I ran into this problem when writing about Basil Borutski, a violent abuser who in 2015 murdered three of his former women partners, in Renfrew County, Ontario. Many justice system records about Boruski’s long history of abuse were unavailable to me because of privacy, even a police photo of him.

And Borutski’s 2024 death, like Epstein’s in 2019, made little difference. The circumstances of his death in prison were entirely withheld from me, leaving unanswered questions. (I wrote about these privacy roadblocks here; CBC’s ace reporter Kristy Nease later found a way to overcome some of them.)

We need to reform our privacy laws. In the case of Borutski, potential victims could not be properly warned about his predatory behaviour because the justice system valued his privacy over their safety.

And we need to stop using privacy as an excuse to protect governments from the public scrutiny of their decisions, such as why a convicted pedophile was allowed into Canada, for purposes one can only shudder to imagine.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office wants to bust up a monopoly. I think I’m the target. Let me explain.

The Privy Council Office (PCO), home of the prime minister and cabinet, has been flooded with complaints about its failures to comply with the Access to Information Act.

Over the last five years, the number of formal complaints filed against PCO, and investigated by the information commissioner of Canada, has more than tripled.

There’s also been a bump in the number of orders that the commissioner has issued against the office, to 42 in 2024-25 from little more than a dozen two years earlier. Orders typically compel departments to deliver documents to a requestor by a specified deadline.

Senior bureaucrats in the Privy Council Office say the growing stack of complaints and orders is bogging down their operations, making it ever more difficult to process new access-to-info requests that come through the door.

“Complaints continue to have a significant impact on PCO’s ability to process and meet legislated timelines,” says a November brief for Michael Sabia, clerk of the Privy Council.

“Resources have been monopolized in responding to complaints in increasingly shorter time frames, including meeting OIC [Office of the Information Commissioner] Orders.”

The document goes on to explain its odd use of the word “monopolized.”

“Over the past five years, complaints have increased by 317%. Further, 71% of all new complaints are from three individuals. The complaint workload from three requestors monopolizes our resources and impacts our ability to respond to all Canadians.”

You can download the entire document (and read more about its context here):

PCO briefing, November 2025

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So who are those three cranky individuals who screw things up for everybody else? The document does not identify them, but I may be one of them.

I regularly file access-to-information requests to PCO, perhaps six to 10 each month. Many requests are for memos written for the prime minister, dealing with matters of state.

PCO almost always gives itself a time extension, beyond the standard 30 days, to respond to each request. Typically their extended due date will be 60, 90, 120 and sometimes 180 days beyond the initial period.

Those extensions are frustrating enough, but more often than not PCO will blow past the extended due date with nary a word of explanation. Imagine patiently waiting six months for a promised response, and when the day finally arrives the office goes silent.

Some years ago, I decided the only way to get PCO’s attention was to lodge a formal complaint with the information commissioner whenever the office ignored its self-assigned due dates. I’ve registered many such complaints.

So I’m likely a charter member of that triumvirate of monopolists that PCO wants to bust up.

My complaints are almost exclusively about PCO’s chronic failure to respond to my requests within legislated deadlines, which is a cut-and-dry grievance. Miss the due date, and I will complain. There’s really no defence for missing a self-imposed deadline. ‘We’re too busy’ doesn’t cut it.

What’s especially galling is that PCO accuses frequent complainers like me of monopolizing resources, thereby preventing timely responses to other Canadians. But that’s exactly why I’m complaining: the office repeatedly fails to deliver timely responses. Respect the due dates and the complaint problem is solved.

But bureaucrats inhabit a bizarro world. For them, the solution to reducing the administrative burden of complaints is not to provide better service. Rather, it’s to vilify the complainers as monopolizing public resources.

This is also the absurd motivation behind a recent proposal from the government to restrict the ability of the information commissioner to issue orders against departments. That is, instead of solving the root problem, just gag the complainers.

Canadians who have neglected to pay their taxes to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) have been coming forward in droves to take advantage of new amnesty rules.

The CRA beefed up its so-called Voluntary Disclosure Program (VDP) on Oct. 1 last year to encourage more renegade taxpayers to come in from the cold.

Many remiss taxpayers had been shunning the program since 2018, the year a clampdown ended a one-size-fits-all approach that gave similar breaks to small players and to more sophisticated operators.

A government panel created to fight tax dodging, the Offshore Compliance Advisory Committee, had warned that the original rules could be seen as “overly generous,” especially with regard to those sophisticated tax filers.

So in 2018, CRA tightened the rules governing the interest and penalty relief available to those signing up for the VDP through declarations of previously undisclosed income.

The result was a sharp drop-off in the number of taxpayers applying for the program, to 9,800 applications in 2018-19 from 19,500 the year before, a decline of almost half.

The suddenly low take-up continued for seven years and prompted a second review of the Voluntary Disclosure Program to assess whether the tightening had gone too far.

The “current VDP policy may have inadvertently discouraged otherwise suitable taxpayers from using the program,” says an internal memo for François-Philippe Champagne, Liberal finance and national revenue minister.

The 2018 restrictions “resulted in lost opportunities for the CRA to increase tax revenues and to bring taxpayers back into compliance with low-cost interventions,” says the July 9 memo, obtained under the Access to Information Act.

A copy of the memo and internal VDP package is available for download here:

VDP

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The agency also carried out opinion surveys, which found that “the general public does not trust that the VDP will provide enough benefit to disclosing an error or omission. … [The] incentives of the program are insufficient.”

So the program was again revamped, now with simpler language and targeted to continue excluding the bad guys – that is, “eggregiously non-compliant taxpayers” – while enticing more “well-intentioned taxpayers” back into compliance.

Under the program, taxpayers who are under audit or investigation are automatically ineligible because they’re not considered voluntary.

The relaxed rules kicked in Oct. 1 and early results show delinquent taxpayers are indeed flocking to apply. Internal statistics show some 1,000 applications were received in each of its first four months, October to January.

“When compared to the monthly average from the previous years, this shows an increase of approximately 40 per cent in applications received,” CRA spokesperson Kim Thiffault said in an email.

Any taxpayer not previously known to the CRA for undeclared income will get a break under the new rules, a reduction of 75 per cent in the interest payable on the late tax amounts, compared with 50 per cent under the previous program.

If CRA is already aware of a taxpayer’s potential non-compliance, and sends that taxpayer notice or a letter, a subsequent VDP application now will provide a 25 per cent reduction in interest owed compared with zero per cent under the old rules.

And both kinds of applications will not attract added penalties, whereas under the old program some would.

Some tax experts have welcomed the new rules, but are warning clients there are risks that CRA may not readily accept declarations under the program. For some taxpayers “the name of the game continues to be, hide the ball and just go on with your head down, hoping the CRA doesn’t find you or find your noncompliance,” tax specialist Robert Kreklewetz told Canadian Lawyer last fall.

Among the most high-profile beneficiaries of the VDP was former prime minister Brian Mulroney, who did not initially declare $225,000 in cash payments received from lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber in the mid-1990s.

Under a generous early version of the VDP program, Mulroney was required to pay income tax on only half of the $225,000 when he finally declared the income to CRA in 1999.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s spurious excuses for gutting the province’s freedom-of-information (FOI) law are exactly why we need transparency legislation in the first place: governments are habitual liars.

Last week, the Ford government said it plans to weaken its sunshine law by erecting brick walls around every minister’s office, including the premier’s. Freedom-of-information requests will no longer be accepted. The change will be retroactive to 1988, when the law first came into force.

Ford issued a flurry of reasons for the draconian move, apparently hoping one might stick. Take your pick:

1. The personal and private information of individuals is being released to requesters under the current law.

2. The cabinet can’t have candid, vigorous debates because their deliberations will be made available to requesters under the current law.

Or if you’re anxious about geopolitics -

3. “Communist” China is stealing Ontario’s secrets under the current legislation and must be stopped.

As anyone who has ever actually used the legislation will attest, Nos. 1 and 2 are bogus. Robust privacy protections are baked into the law, so much so that they continue for 30 years after the death of an individual. The law also safeguards cabinet deliberations for 20 years, an ironclad provision that was affirmed, endorsed and expanded by the Supreme Court of Canada just two years ago.

As for No. 3, any superpower reduced to using freedom-of-information laws to carry out espionage probably isn’t much of a threat. Under Ontario’s current law, getting useful government information of any kind is like pulling teeth. Getting information about critical infrastructure or security is absolutely impossible, and rightly so.

So Ford is being duplicitous about the reasons for his proposed “modernization” of freedom-of-information. And equipping ordinary citizens to cut through that kind of political bullshit is the very reason we have sunshine laws.

So what is Ford actually up to?

His government lost a major freedom-of-information case at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Dec. 29. A three-judge panel ruled Ford must surrender for review any records from his personal cell phone that contain government business.

The court rejected the argument that the requesters, Global TV and Dr. Brooks Fallis, had no proof that any government business had been conducted on the cell phone. Ford publicizes the telephone number as a direct link to him for Ontarians who want to talk about government business. So hard to imagine that absolutely nobody dialled him up for that purpose.

The province is seeking leave to appeal the ruling at the Ontario Court of Appeal, with a decision expected by the end of next month. But Ford has pulled an ace: his proposed amendments to freedom-of-information are retroactive. So his cell phone records, along with everything else in his office, become immune to FOI requests, effectively quashing the ruling from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

The changes will also inoculate emails, texts, memos and other records inside ministers’ offices against nosy requesters, including those looking for evidence of backroom deals with developers and cronies. Think Greenbelt scandal, or Skills Development controversy.

Another of Ford’s changes would lengthen the basic waiting period for a response to requests, from 30 calendar days to 45 business days. The move would effectively double the basic FOI waiting period, just as the digital era is accelerating everyone’s work life, including reporters’ deadlines. That’s like building a cobblestone road in the age of sportscars.

Ontario’s regressive plan follows rollbacks of freedom-of-information in Nova Scotia, British Columbia and at the federal level, suggesting governments are more emboldened, perhaps inspiring one another about ways to curb the public’s right to know. It’s a race to the bottom, a wider retreat to a darker time.

In a world roiled by tariffs, wars and state coercion, with governments inclining toward autocracy, we need sunshine laws more than ever to bust through the lies. Honk if you agree.

On Thursday, the Liberal government finally got around to asking ordinary Canadians how to fix the country’s premier transparency law, the Access to Information Act. The Act, dating from 1983, empowers citizens to hold governments to account through requests for internal information.

The Act requires a thorough “review” of the legislation every five years. This latest round was launched on schedule, June 20, 2025. But more than eight months elapsed before the bureaucrats invited citizens and others to weigh in. The delay suggests a weak appetite for reform on the inside.

Treasury Board, the powerful department that manages billions in government spending, is in charge of the review. That’s a conflict of interest if ever there was one. Bureaucrats inherently hostile to public scrutiny have thus been tasked with finding ways to let the light shine in. You can imagine how this will go.

The government has also published a discussion paper, setting out its own proposals for reform. Treasury Board released a draft version of the document to me in December, after I asked for it under the Access to Information Act. The released draft was thoroughly censored. (Savour, for a moment, the exquisite irony of a government heavily redacting its suggestions for transparency.)

The version released Thursday removes the blacked-out bits. More on that in a moment.

The first thing to notice in the paper is the complete absence of any reforms touching on cabinet secrecy. Canada has strict protections for cabinet records, tighter even than in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and most Canadian provinces, jurisdictions that have similar Westminster-style democracies. For years, Canadian academics and others have called for a loosening of cabinet secrecy. But the word “cabinet” doesn’t even appear in the Treasury Board document.

Also missing is any suggestion to roll back secrecy at ministers’ offices, which are exempt from the Act. Justin Trudeau campaigned on this issue for the Liberals in 2015, then got cold feet after realizing it would expose his own ministers. So, the highest levels of the Canadian government remain comfortably inoculated against access-to-information requests.

Other proposals in the discussion paper are couched as improvements, but in fact are slyly regressive.

The government ominously claims that “bad actors use digital tools to flood the ATI [Access to Information] system with requests,” overwhelming departments and creating delays for everyone else. The paper never identifies these “bad actors.” (I know of one good actor that uses digital tools systematically to discover and publicly post recently released access-to-info documents. It’s the Investigative Journalism Foundation, which does this as a service to Canadians because the federal government declines to take on the task.)

The paper proposes certifying so-called bad actors as “vexatious applicants,” so that departments can legally ignore any of their requests. That’s a huge change from the current law, which allows certification of individual requests as vexatious, but does not so label the requestors themselves. Even under the current law, very few requests are certified as such.

Another proposal would give more heft to the information commissioner’s orders to departments to release documents to requesters. The commissioner, who’s the independent sheriff of the system, was given order-making power in 2019 – but without any enforcement ability. And some departments have blithely ignored her orders. The paper would upgrade those orders to the status of a Federal Court judge’s orders, with the attendant enforcement mechanisms.

But there’s a catch. The discussion paper aims to drastically reduce the number of orders she issues, through more mandatory mediation. And the commissioner would be compelled by law to mitigate her orders by considering any evidence that a department “did its best” to respond to an access request. In other words, E for effort might get a department off the hook.

Another portentous proposal would create two streams of government records. One stream would consist of “official records” retained for accountability, and accessible under the Access to Information Act. The other stream would consist of “transitory records” – never defined – that would be off-limits to access requests, and indeed could be destroyed relatively quickly. Transitory suggests emails and texts, long a rich hunting ground for reporters, activists, NGOs and others. (Consider the trove of emails in the Epstein files.) The government argues this two-stream division could speed up processing of requests. For journalists, it would strip out accountability.

The paper proposes establishing a “duty to document,” long a demand from transparency advocates who argue that too many internal government decisions and actions are poorly recorded, if at all. The new duty, though, would apply only to the official repositories described above, leaving vast swaths of so-called transitory documents exempt from the requirement.

Treasury Board is also proposing that Indigenous groups have better access to relevant government records, and better protections for their own records. Indigenous advocates are better placed than I to assess the efficacy of these reforms.

In sum, this week’s much delayed request for public input from Canadians, along with the release of a paper larded with regressive measures, speaks volumes about Ottawa’s current review: another inside job in the making.

Lisa Banfield, common-law wife of the man who meticulously slaughtered 22 people six years ago, recently published a memoir of her life-on-eggshells with a controlling killer.

The First Survivor: Life with Canada’s Deadliest Mass Shooter (Sutherland House) is disturbing reading, though not for any fresh light it sheds on the gunman’s merciless rampage. That part of the horrific story has been told before.

Banfield was brutally attacked by her spouse on April 18, 2020, the night of the first murders in Portapique, N.S. She barely escaped, and hid in the frosty woods overnight, terrified and badly injured.

She emerged at dawn, hypothermic with a broken vertebra and cracked ribs. Soon she was in RCMP custody, even as the killer remained at large. She told officers everything, including vital information about his fake police vehicle used to dupe victims. Until that moment, the Mounties had inexplicably discounted every witness report about the bogus patrol car.

Banfield continued to spill information for days and months, and bravely testified at a public inquiry, facing hostile family members in the hyper-charged hearing room.

Most of her account has already appeared in the Mass Casualty Commission’s final report or in often-sensationalized news media reports. I included much of Banfield’s frank testimony in my 2023 book about the rampage and the botched police effort to stop the killer. (RCMP finally gunned him down after a chance encounter at a gas bar.)

What’s valuable and new in the memoir, at least to me, is Banfield’s recounting of the desolate years leading up to the slaughter, and her life-sapping grief in its aftermath.

We learn about Banfield’s oversized family in the Halifax suburb of Beaver Bank, presided over by a hard-working mother and slyly critical father, both of whom were alcoholics. As a babysitting teenager, Banfield was sexually assaulted by a neighbour, who had done the same to her sister Maureen. She belatedly told her parents. Her weak mum deferred to dad, who tersely shrugged it off, saying “Is that all?”

“I believed for the first time in my life that I didn’t matter,” Banfield writes. “My parents, my most cherished guardians, didn’t protect me.” Sisters Lisa, Maureen and Janice consequently clung one to the other, and stayed close through adulthood.

Banfield’s deep vulnerability made her an easy mark for a predatory man. Over a 19-year relationship, her partner coercively controlled her money, work, social life and family ties. He sold her car to make her dependent on him for transportation. He brutally assaulted her at least 10 times. On the few occasions police showed up, they did nothing. The cops were his buddies. He warned Banfield that if she ever left, he would hunt down and kill her family members. He collected an arsenal of unregistered guns to do the job.

Some bereaved families blamed Banfield for the killings, accusing her of enabling the murderer. RCMP charged her with helping the perp acquire ammunition, acknowledging she knew nothing about his intentions. (The charge, deflecting from Mountie failures, was resolved without a prosecution.) The families sued her.

In the years that followed, Banfield – vilified, at times verging on suicidal – was supported emotionally and financially by her steadfast, loving sisters. She ran up $75,000 in legal costs, with no income to pay the bills, which were also beyond the capacity of her sisters. A judicial settlement conference in 2024 finally sorted the lawsuit and various claims on the dead perp’s $2 million in assets, allowing Banfield to pay off her debts and secure a modest living.

Banfield says religious belief guided her through the darkness, but her sisters are the true saints. They held her hand through teenage sexual assaults, dysfunctional alcoholic parenting, a predatory narcissistic partner, the scorn of grieving relatives, the hot spotlight of a public inquiry and the grind of a wobbly justice system. Her instinct for survival saved her from a vicious murderer on April 18, 2020, but her memoir shows she has been fending off assaults for most of her life, long before and well after Portapique. Sisterhood has made all the difference.

The head of Ottawa’s public service got an earful from the federal information commissioner about the dismal state of access to information – the sign of a growing rift between the Liberal government and Parliament’s watchdog on transparency.

At a Nov. 12 meeting, Caroline Maynard presented Michael Sabia, clerk of the Privy Council, with statistics detailing the deterioration of the access-to-info system – and cited Sabia’s own department as among the worst offenders.

“Inefficiencies abound,” illegal delays are rife and backlogs are growing at the Privy Council Office (PCO), which has become the No. 3 most-complained-about department in the current fiscal year, says a meeting backgrounder prepared for Maynard. (Immigration and Transport are Nos. 1 and 2.)

The Privy Council Office also “exaggerated claims of harm” when Maynard’s investigators challenged officials about why some documents were being withheld from requesters, says the five-page backgrounder, itself released under the Access to Information Act.

The heavily redacted copy of Maynard’s briefing is available here:

Maynard Backgrounder

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Sabia, a longtime public servant and recently CEO of Hydro-Quebec, was appointed the new clerk of the Privy Council on July 7 by Prime Minister Mark Carney. In a first message to the federal workforce under his supervision, Sabia said “we need to have a sense of personal accountability for what we do.”

The Privy Council Office violated legislated deadlines for responding to access-to-information requests 278 times in 2023-24, Maynard’s statistics show. That’s a big jump from 169 and 258 in each of the two previous years.

Delayed requests have sometimes been held up for two or more years. The law requires responses within 30 days, unless an institution gives itself a longer period because of the complexity of the request. PCO has increasingly been blowing past both types of deadlines.

Maynard also found that PCO has too readily claimed that releasing certain records under the Access to Information Act would cause harm.

She cited a recent investigation where PCO steadfastly invoked a claim of harm, but reversed itself at the last minute and released the supposedly damaging records. In another case at Federal Court, a judge dismissed claims of harm – and required PCO to pay $4,405.59 in legal costs to the applicant. The judge said the applicant should not have been compelled to go to court to obtain the record he sought.

Maynard has been sounding the alarm since last May, shortly after the 2025 election gave the Liberals a minority government under Carney. “I have observed a steady decline in the access to information system, to the point where it no longer serves its intended purpose,” she said in a letter to the prime minister at the time.

PCO pushed back, suggesting in a June 11 memo for Carney that Maynard herself was the problem. Her ramped-up orders to the department to release information have created a “significant administrative burden,” said the internal brief, which have boosted backlogs and diverted resources from the processing of newly arrived requests.

In September last year, bureaucrats at Treasury Board – which is responsible for setting access-to-info policies – suggested the government may need to “revisit” Maynard’s order-making powers, which were conferred on her in 2019 through Bill C-58.

The information commissioner’s orders “are meant to be a measure of last resort, but their use has steadily increased … and is becoming challenging for institutions to manage,” says a draft discussion paper.

Maynard bristled at any suggestion that her wings should be clipped. “The Commissioner … is opposed, as a matter of principle, to any measure that would weaken her order-making power,” her office said in a statement issued shortly before Christmas.

“In her view, any ‘revisiting’ of the order-making power that resulted in a scaling back of this power would represent a step backward for the access to information system [bold italics in original].”

The back-and-forth salvos suggest a rising tension between Maynard and the Liberal government as Treasury Board conducts its legally mandated five-year review of the Access to Information Act and its administration. Treasury Board’s draft discussion paper indicates the government is considering restrictions on citizens’ right of access.

The RCMP has handed out 23 awards for excellence to officers and employees in Nova Scotia for their performance during the April 2020 mass murders, in which a gunman impersonating a Mountie murdered 22 people in cold blood.

The flurry of awards for bravery, ethics & integrity, and outstanding service were quietly approved by RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme last May, more than two years after an inquiry slammed the force for failing to stop the gunman during a 13-hour rampage.

The Mass Casualty Commission’s final report of March 2023 also blasted the Mounties for failing to alert Nova Scotians to the killer, including his use of a fake RCMP patrol car to roam the northern part of the province looking for – and finding – victims.

“All the individuals and units … went above and beyond demonstrating the RCMP core values throughout such a harrowing experience,” says an internal letter to Duheme recommending the awards.

“All the dedicated individuals mentioned within this report displayed incredible bravery or outstanding service, professional ethics and integrity, unwavering support and commitment in responding to the largest mass casualty shooting in Canadian history, its aftermath and the public inquiry that followed.”

The awards were culled from 316 nomination packages reviewed by the force’s “H Strong Committee,” an internal group named for H Division, the Mountie designation for the force’s Nova Scotia section.

Internal records detailing the awards were released under the Access to Information Act, and are available here:

RCMP Commissioner's Commendations

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A spokesperson for the RCMP acknowledged the commendations, but declined to provide the names of individual recipients or the reasons for their recognition.

“In line with the Privacy Act, the names of individuals can not be provided, as personal information is protected,” media-relations officer Camille Boily-Lavoie said in Ottawa.

The RCMP has often publicized the names of recipients of Commissioner’s Commendations, the force’s highest award, and has detailed the actions that warranted recognition. For example, eight officers and one civilian were publicly identified during a 2023 award ceremony in Cape Breton, N.S., overseen by Duheme. The event included descriptions of the award-winners’ actions.

Boily-Lavoie did not respond when asked to explain why many previous recipients of Commissioner’s Commendations have been publicized if the Privacy Act in fact forbids such disclosure.

The mass casualty-related commendations were for bravery (15 awards), professional ethics and integrity (3) and outstanding service (5), she said. In addition, Duheme distributed nine lesser awards, that is, eight Commissioner’s Merit Awards and one Commissioner’s Unit Commendation for Outstanding Service.

Boily-Lavoie said one “commendation was awarded to an individual that passed away in the mass casualty event.” She did not provide an identity, but the only officer killed by the gunman was Acting Cpl. Heidi Stevenson.

Injured after the gunman rammed her patrol car, Stevenson fired at least 14 rounds from her service pistol at the killer, wounding him before succumbing to his gunshots. The Mass Casualty Commission singled out Stevenson as a highly competent professional, among the few RCMP voices urging that Nova Scotians be informed that the gunman was impersonating an officer in a fake patrol car he had meticulously outfitted with decals and police equipment.

The Unit Commendation for Outstanding Service was awarded to a litigation team of nine employees, most of them lawyers, who were required to vet, compile, redact and deliver thousands of documents to the Mass Casualty Commission.

The commission’s final report faulted the RCMP for its slow delivery of documents, and its inability to locate key material. One of its final recommendations was for an independent audit of the RCMP’s document management and production. The force rejected an independent audit, saying its internal audit was sufficient. Even so, the internal audit found a raft of documentation problems.

The RCMP Commissioner’s Commendation is a yellow-and-blue pin, rather than a medal, emblazoned with the gold head of a buffalo. The award also comes with a certificate.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) gets a lot of flak for its processing of Access to Information Act (ATIA) requests, especially for its long delays to respond. But lately they’ve been doing a few things right.

To wit, they’ve begun to waive the standard $5 application fee for every new request coming through the door.

In doing so, they’re abandoning a wonky system that cost them about $14,600 each year to process requests that brought in fees worth only $6,000 or $7,000 – and they couldn’t even keep that cash. All the revenue was turned over to the government’s general coffers.

So to save money, they stopped collecting money.

“The current process is inefficient, creates delays and is a poor user experience,” says an internal document, dated Nov. 12. “[F]urthermore, no funds are retained by LAC to offset costs.”

LAC thus acknowledges the folly of using a broken bucket that leaks faster the more that is poured into it. A handful of other federal institutions have also dropped their $5 application fees over the years: CBC-Radio Canada, National Defence, the Information Commissioner’s office and Crown-Indigenous Relations.

The internal LAC document outlining the change was obtained under the Access to Information Act, for which the $5 application fee was waived. Read it here:

Briefing note - LAC fee for ATIPs

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For years, the federal government’s primary means of collecting the $5 fee, never increased since 1983, was through an applicant’s cheque, which typically cost a department $50 to process. An online request service available to most institutions was launched in October 2018, allowing for digital payments on credit cards, dramatically reducing payment-processing costs to mere pennies.

But many users still prefer the traditional way: paper-based requests sent via Canada Post enclosed with a cheque or a bank draft (which itself can cost twice the face value). At Library and Archives, 30 per cent of access-to-info requests still arrive in this old-fangled manner, creating administrative headaches. And there’s no in-house electronic payment system at LAC to help ease the pain.

Last fiscal year, LAC had to issue 124 refunds to mail-in requesters for various reasons, driving up the institution’s administrative costs. The federal government’s online system, on the other hand, processes refunds electronically at little cost.

Leslie Weir, Canada’s national librarian and archivist, approved the fee-waiving policy on Nov. 26. Fees had been routinely waived since early 2024 only for those requests submitted to LAC by Indigenous groups, under a wider Treasury Board policy. Now everyone gets a break on fees at LAC.

The internal document acknowledges the no-fee policy could trigger more requests, but points to the examples of National Defence and Crown-Indigenous Relations where dropping the $5 charge did not lead to any significant increase in requests.

Library and Archives also launched a new digital service in June 2024 whereby the original documents released through access-to-information requests are made available to everyone. The searchable database now contains almost 20,000 historical documents, covering a wide range of dates.

Two other institutions – the National Capital Commission (NCC) and CBC-Radio Canada – had also been posting original ATIA documents online, but their databases were shut down last year after Canada’s languages commissioner ruled that everything had to be translated into the other official language, whether English or French. CBC and NCC, which had been posting only in the original language of the document, declined to absorb the expense of translation and terminated the projects.

LAC is not required to translate its posted documents because they are historical rather than operational and therefore not subject to the rules of the Official Languages Act.

The latest moves at LAC are a small respite from criticisms of historians and others, who have complained that a long-standing system for automatic declassification of historical government documents has been supplanted by ad hoc access-to-information requests, which now are required to declassify older records. Critics say the ATIA process is unpredictable, unwieldy, time-consuming and fraught with dubious redactions.

One requester seeking older RCMP records under access-to-information was advised by LAC not to expect a response for at least 80 years.

The federal government this week dumped its load of annual statistics about citizens’ use of the Access to Information Act.

The numbers usually arrive like sludge just before Christmas, well after Parliament has recessed, and when no one is paying attention. There’s no analysis, just a blizzard of spreadsheet data that’s already nine months out of date.

Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard earlier this year complained about the slow delivery of results, noting that Scotland releases its statistics every three months. Her admonition was to no avail.

Despite the stale numbers, several trends are unmistakable.

First, there’s been a massive drop in the total number of access requests that citizens filed, to about 34,000 in 2024-25 from 47,000 the year before, and from 52,000 the year before that. That’s a decline of more than a third over two years.

The shrinkage is partly linked to the 2020 pandemic, which triggered a surge in requests for documentation about what the government was doing to meet the health crisis. But as the COVID emergency fades it’s unclear why the numbers keep falling.

One explanation may be an abysmal on-time performance. The Act sets out clear timelines for responses to requests, but the latest stats show the government is violating those legal deadlines more than 35 per cent of the time, its worst showing ever. Public-affairs information generally has a best-before date, and if requesters are routinely served up stale documents, some may have decided not to waste time even asking for them.

Another trend: in 2024-25, more than a quarter of requests completed resulted in no information released, about the same level as last year. These dud requests are more numerous than in any previous period, again suggesting requesters may have good reasons to throw in the towel.

One bright spot is the media, which filed almost 5,600 requests, a number slightly higher than the two previous years. The absolute numbers have held steady even in the face of a general decline in citizens’ use of the Access to Information Act, and despite a collapsing news industry.

As a requester, I often hear about the limited resources that departments are provided to process Access to Information Act requests. That claim is usually made to explain chronically poor service.

But this year’s numbers show a record $118 million spent on processing requests, even as the numbers of requests coming through the door have slumped by a third. Surely fewer requests + more money must mean better service? But service in fact is worse, as measured by the late delivery of records and other metrics.

The government, though, has yet another explanation. The information commissioner has been issuing too many orders to recalcitrant departments, requiring them to turn over requested documents, a power she was first given in 2019. Maynard issued 375 such orders in 2024-25 alone, and bureaucrats are chafing at the administrative burden of complying with them. That’s why there’s an ominous move afoot inside government to strip away some of her powers.

The Access to Information Act requires a thorough review every five years, and the government “launched” the latest review in June. In fact, there’s been a failure to launch. A public consultation process that was to begin in the fall is inexplicably stalled. The government has gone silent about next steps.

In the end, we have a government with a deteriorating performance record, with little interest in reforming access to information, and with every motivation to further restrict the public’s right to hold officials to account.

Update Jan. 30, 2026: Since this post was published, I received a Nov. 4, 2025, document from Treasury Board that claims the sharp drop in total access-to-information requests received in 2024-25 compared with the previous year (down 27.6 per cent) is “mainly due to decreases in requests received by the Canada Border Services Agency [CBSA], as more requests are being submitted to the department as personal information requests under the PA [Privacy Act] rather than access to information requests.” This explanation - that privacy requests are displacing access requests - was extracted only because of an access request I made, and was not part of Treasury Board’s report to Parliament. It should have been included. In recent years, CBSA has received a lot of requests from would-be migrants who want updates on their status, which has been an inappropriate use of the Access to Information Act and has distorted year-end statistics.

Stephen Thorne has died. The bitter, unexpected death of a tough journalist who wrote about death but couldn’t report on his own. He’d have written a damn fine story about it.

I was his boss for years, in Halifax and Ottawa, though Stephen had no time for bosses. He followed his nose for stories whether or not anybody asked for them. Sometimes he seemed like a pesky kid brother, a bag of trouble who had to be bailed out then reprimanded. Stephen was usually good-humoured about it, but always reverted to rogue.

He jump-started his career by dropping out of Acadia University, in Wolfville, N.S. He freelanced for the Halifax Herald with stories and photos from the Annapolis Valley, absorbing the profession and elevating the newspaper’s sleepy standards. He took flying lessons so one day he could be Errol Flynn, dropping into disasters with pen and notebook.

In 1984, Stephen joined the Halifax bureau of The Canadian Press news agency, where disasters were endemic. (The bureau was established in 1917; weeks later the Halifax Explosion cut the telegraph wires.) He began writing about mass deaths while covering the 1985 Arrow Air crash at Gander, Nfld., 256 victims. A mine blew up in Plymouth, N.S., in 1992, killing all 26 men underground. Stephen was there. A passenger jet plunged into St. Margarets Bay, in 1998. Stephen reported on the recovery of floating body parts of 229 people. And so on: Deaths at sea when giant cargo ships slipped into the North Atlantic. War deaths in Afghanistan and Kosovo. Death by race riot in Soweto. Of course he paid a personal price. No one can callus themselves against such horrors.

We got drunk sometimes, and sang “I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier” while stumbling on a Halifax pier. We invented Computer Club, a semi-regular bash at his place to console a colleague who’d been sacked. We marvelled like 10-year-olds at an old sword found among his late dad’s effects at the family home on Connaught Avenue. We got seasick on a heaving fishing boat while jigging for tomcod off Peggy’s Cove. Stephen had a nickname for everyone. Mine was “The Mighty Beebster,” which he blasted on the baseball PA system in Amherst, N.S., when I nervously came up to bat. His family visited our rental cottage on the Northumberland Strait, where crabs pinched the kids’ fingers. We watched Apollo 13 at the Oxford Theatre on Quinpool Road, and got ribbed for being on a date.

Stephen was allergic to news conferences, where reporters get spoon fed. In 1992, the owners of the deadly Westray Mine corralled journalists each day – with the connivance of the RCMP – to dribble out controlled accounts of the search for bodies. Stephen instead staked out the parking lot of the Peter Pan Motel, where searchers who had actually plumbed the shafts – the draegermen – arrived after shift each day. They opened up, describing a choked, underground hellscape. He dared not take notes, but rushed to his room afterward to write it all down. No one else came close to that story. If awards mean anything, Stephen’s reporting clinched many. His eerie account of retrieving human remains from the Swissair disaster while in a boat was the showcase story for a National Newspaper Award in 1999. But here’s the thing: in his brief autobiography posted on his website, not once did he mention any awards. For Stephen, it was the story, not the accolades. I leave to others an appreciation of his photography, a broad canvas capturing cowboys, models, Afghanis, eagles, vintage aircraft, and sports. The images speak of a journalist whose searching eyes were as adept as his ears.

I visited Stephen a few times at his sick bed, rehashing old times, joking, trading gossip. The last time I saw him we hugged. I told him I loved him. He said the same. Such plain words for friends who make their living by writing. Crazy.

The above image of Borutski was taken by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) on the day of his arrest. They released it publicly at the time. It was reproduced widely by news media. You can easily find it on the Internet.

I asked the OPP informally for a copy of the original image for my book. Their surprising answer to me was a firm “no.” Handing over the image would be an unwarranted invasion of Borutski’s privacy, they said.

Huh?

I then asked for the image under Ontario’s freedom-of-information law. Again, the OPP withheld the image to safeguard Borutski’s privacy. I complained to the province’s information commissioner about the OPP’s decision.

This week, I got a final ruling. The commissioner’s office backed the OPP, agreeing that releasing the photo to me would violate Borutski’s privacy. You can read the ruling here:

Ruling re: Borutski image

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Borutski died last year, but the office said that his privacy rights extend 30 years beyond his death. So I can apply again for the image in 2054.

Welcome to the weird and wacky world of privacy in Canada.

Why wouldn’t I simply download the Borutski image from the web for my book, you might ask? Mostly because I needed a copy of the OPP original, without any manipulations, such as cropping or colour adjustment. Also, copyright becomes blurry.

I ran into a privacy brick wall two more times in my research.

Borutski died on March 28, 2024, at Millhaven Institution in Bath, Ont., while serving a life sentence for the three murders. Corrections Canada announced his death five days later, citing “apparent natural causes.”

Under the Access to Information Act, I asked for internal documents related to the death, in order to learn the circumstances and official cause. Was it suicide? An accident? Something sinister?

Corrections Canada identified 158 pages as relevant to my request, but released only six pages to me. These were all heavily redacted, and useless.

The reason the information was withheld? To protect Borutski’s privacy. I appealed to the Information Commissioner of Canada, and promptly lost. Under federal law, privacy is protected for 20 years after an individual’s death. So I can apply again in 2044.

Another encounter with Fortress Privacy involved the 2022 coroner’s inquest into the Borutski murders. The inquest in Pembroke, Ont., was broadcast live over the web (and was recorded), in addition to being open to the public.

Months later, I asked under Ontario’s freedom-of-information (FOI) law for select recordings of witness testimony. I was refused. The office said releasing the audio-video would violate the witnesses’ privacy rights.

I complained to the province’s information commissioner, and was told I didn’t have a leg to stand on. The FOI law required the coroner to withhold the material, even though the testimony had been public and was even webcast.

But here I met with some success. I was advised that if I asked the coroner’s office informally for the recordings, then the privacy provisions of the FOI law would not apply. So I dropped my complaint, asked informally, and received the material I needed.

I learned that the public testimony of witnesses is considered private only if I request the recordings under the freedom-of-information law. If I dispensed with the law, and proceeded informally, their privacy need not be protected.

Huh?

These three instances highlight the sometimes bizarre outcomes that can ensue when privacy eclipses transparency. We need to rethink our often-wonky privacy safeguards in Canada, and inject some common sense and balance for the public good.

And as I have written previously, reform is especially urgent in cases where abusers of women, such as Borutski, enjoy privacy protections during their predatory paths that prevent their victims from protecting themselves. The unchallenged supremacy of privacy is not just ludicrous. It can also threaten lives.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s own department is struggling to comply with a flurry of legal orders requiring it to release information to requesters who’ve been denied their rights under the Access to Information Act.

In the last two years, Caroline Maynard, Canada’s information commissioner, has hit the Privy Council Office (PCO) with at least 87 such orders after her investigators determined the office had repeatedly failed to abide by the transparency legislation.

In 2019, Maynard was given order-making power that would require recalcitrant federal departments to turn over documents to aggrieved requesters, and she has done so hundreds of times. But Maynard only began to serve PCO with such orders beginning in 2022-23, creating a huge and sudden workload.

“Each order represents a significant administrative burden on PCO ATIP as well as the secretariats,” says a June 11, 2025, memo for Carney.

“This forces us to prioritize files in order to respond to the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC), taking away from the other legislated deadlines.”

The memo, which itself was obtained under the Access to Information Act, says there are about 218 active access-to-info complaints being processed against PCO by Maynard’s office, of which 80 per cent come from three requesters.

The “new workload” of complying with the orders helped pushed the backlog of unprocessed requests at PCO to about 560 in 2024-25. In the same year, the department received 744 requests.

Read the internal memo here:

Carney Memo

14.6MB ∙ PDF file

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Maynard wrote directly to Carney on May 13, 2025, raising a general alarm about access-to-information. “I have observed a steady decline in the access to information system, to the point where it no longer serves its intended purpose,” she said in a letter. “The time for action has come.”

Maynard proposed a meeting with the prime minister, but the memo to Carney shows he delegated any face-to-face session to his senior public servant, John Hannaford, clerk of the Privy Council. Hannaford noted that the information commissioner has never met directly with a prime minister.

The Access to Information Act requires the government to conduct a review of the system every five years. The current review was launched June 20 this year, though the government released few details about the process.

An internal May 26 memo about the review, obtained through access-to-information from Treasury Board, is heavily redacted, though it shows the government has been consulting with Indigenous groups since May last year. Other aspects of the planned review are blacked out under provisions protecting advice and cabinet secrets.

Read the Treasury Board memo here:

ATIA Review

913KB ∙ PDF file

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In the spring federal election campaign leading to the April 28 vote, which gave Carney’s Liberals a minority, reforming the Act did not appear in the party’s platform.

“It’s not in the platform, it’s in my head and so I will now, against the advice of my advisers, put it out of my head,” Carney said on the campaign trail on April 25. “I do think looking at access to information is quite important.”

Carney presented himself as an access-to-information outsider who “can’t always follow the process.” He said his government would review the Act, although the legislation itself requires such a review.

The last review, begun in 2020, was panned by critics for focusing on internal administrative reforms while eschewing legislative changes to the Act itself. The process was conducted by government bureaucrats, leading to accusations of an insider job.

Canada’s Access to Information Act, which came into force in 1983, has long been denounced as archaic and poorly administered, with too many loopholes protecting cabinet material and advice, among other weaknesses.

The RCMP has a venerable history of flouting the Access to Information Act, invoking excessive redactions and imposing delays that too often violate the letter of the law.

Canada’s information commission raps the RCMP’s knuckles every few years and they always promise to do better. But like clockwork, they soon fall back into bad habits. Requestors who deal regularly with the RCMP learn to live with constant disappointment, and quickly become cynical about real or lasting reform.

A newly released internal audit explains in part why the RCMP sucks so badly at transparency: their software for processing access-to-information requests is antediluvian, next to useless, and on its last legs. Actually, that last part may be a blessing.

As of next year, the program - Access Pro Case Management - will be an orphan because the vendor will stop supporting it. The RCMP needs at least $6.5 million for a new system but, in the bloodless words of the auditors, “a sustained funding source … has not been identified.” In other words, the cupboard is bare.

The finding is a lowlight of the Audit of Document Management and Production Processes, completed in March but posted online only in August.

The audit was a direct response to the Mass Casualty Commission, which investigated a horrific mass killing in Nova Scotia in spring 2020. Twenty-two people were murdered at gunpoint by a man masquerading as an RCMP officer, using uniforms and a fake police cruiser.

The commission issued 130 recommendations, most of which faulted the RCMP for incompetence and blind spots, both of which proved lethal. One of the recommendations, No. 128, called for an “external independent audit” of the way the force organizes and produces documents, because extracting RCMP evidence for the commission to inspect was a hot mess. Just as in access-to-info, the force was late to deliver, or couldn’t find material, or didn’t record essential evidence. (See my previous substack on officer note-taking for examples of the problems.)

The RCMP did conduct the audit, from October 2023 to August 2024. But the force rejected the stipulation that it had to be external and independent, claiming an internal audit was sufficient.

The audit’s conclusion was that RCMP documentation systems “may” be inefficient, difficult and delayed, an observation already well established by the Mass Casualty Commission. “May” is the word you get when the analysis is an inside job.

The internal report found that 63 per cent of the force’s information-management money went into “sustaining legacy services,” versus only 16 per cent on new ones. Training was inadequate. There was a lack of automation and record tracking.

The branch that processes Access to Information Act requests was cited as one of the worst examples of information mismanagement.

Access Pro, developed by a private-sector firm more than two decades ago, can’t communicate with other government document systems. As a result: “Most of ATIP Branch’s work is manual in nature …”

“Access Pro Case Management response times are contributing to production delays as this software is out-of-date, is slow for searching … and loading information, and contains duplication,” says the report.

“Additionally, Access Pro Case Management does not allow analysts to sort files based on the earliest action date. Instead, they must check each file individually in order to determine which files need attention.”

None of this is new. Canada’s information commissioner, Caroline Maynard, reported on these problems at the RCMP in November 2020, including on the antiquated software. So the latest audit simply recycles the same well-known failings, and the same familiar promises of reform, six years later.

The fact it was an in-house investigation - contrary to the Mass Casualty Commission’s request - means we’re likely still on the hamster wheel, going round and round, with endless delays and redactions and no meaningful prospect for reform.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s the point.