A tribute to Canada's first information commissioner

Inger Hansen survived Nazi oppression and economic privation

Inger Hansen (1929-2013), Canada’s first information commissioner, knew something about political tyranny and open government.

Hansen forfeited a normal childhood while growing up in Copenhagen during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, from 1940 to 1945. She witnessed Jewish classmates suddenly disappearing, gone into hiding, the teacher cautioning her to say not a word. She was trained by the Danish underground how to shoot a gun should the need ever arise. She saw others shot.

“I was between 10 and 14 years old during the occupation and will never forget the look of want, suffering and overall human deprivation that I saw so early in my life,” she told biographer Jette Ashlee in 1988. “Those of us who saw any of it will never be able to forget.”

Hansen was appointed in June 1983 as Canada’s independent watchdog for the newly passed Access to Information Act, a job no one had ever done before. Her remit was to investigate the claims of people who felt they’d been shafted by the government’s non-responses to their formal requests for information under the Act.

She was effectively in charge of a government start-up, responsible for hiring administrative staff and investigators, and establishing protocols for handling complaints. It was in fact her third such start-up for the federal government, following stints as Canada’s first prisons ombudsman, as it then was called (1973); and first privacy commissioner (1977).

Hansen, who immigrated to Canada in 1950, was a self-made woman. She began as a farm hand and maid, and later bounced through more than two dozen badly paid jobs in British Columbia and elsewhere before resolving to become a lawyer. Through sheer grit - and despite initially poor grades - she got a law degree in 1960 from the University of British Columbia.

Hansen practiced criminal law on her own until 1969, when she joined the federal Justice Department. She persevered at a time when women were unwelcome in the legal profession. She once was told she had lost a job competition to become a Crown prosecutor because “no woman can do that kind of work.”

Her appointment as information commissioner resonated with her Scandinavian roots, she told Ashlee. Hansen cited the Althing, literally translated as “general meeting,” an ancient form of Norse parliament. “It was a true form of open government,” she said. “No information is withheld when all citizens are directly involved in oral exchanges of question, answer, explanation and interpretation.”

Iceland’s Althing, for example, was founded in 930 in an open field near present-day Reykjavik. All islanders were welcome to participate, from farmers to traders - though only if they were free men. Hansen was inspired by this Nordic version of grassroots, open democracy.

Hansen’s early annual reports to Parliament on the Access to Information Act are almost quaint, reflecting a general uncertainty about how this novel legislation might work. Her office encouraged telephone inquiries, and accepted collect calls, from the public in an era without email or Internet. One confused caller asked the office how to obtain a “list of interesting places to visit in Canada.”

Her first annual report, covering just nine months (July 1, 1983 to March 31, 1984) is 40 years old this spring. The document signalled many of the problems that would become intractable in the years ahead. She’d already accrued a backlog of about 50 unresolved cases, or about a third of all those filed. “The backlog is, of course, a concern and I intend to have it cleaned up by the end of 1984,” she said. In fact, the backlog was never cleaned up and grew ever larger over the decades.

The RCMP was early a problem institution, as it remains today, with the most complaints. Delays in responses were also common. Hansen especially noted the frustration of journalists, who had expected to be handed requested information within hours. Her first report offered a tip sheet for requestors, which seems naive in retrospect. For example, she said that if a request involves personal information about others, which is protected under the Act, a requester should try promising the department to keep the personal information confidential. I can’t imagine any ATIP officer ever buying that.

Hansen’s style was cordial but persistent. Someone once called her a “velvet steamroller.” She resisted early proposals that her office be given the power to order the release of documents, a tool the current commissioner has wielded since 2019. She believed mediation could resolve most complaints. But she also took the government to Federal Court 15 times in her first four years when negotiations failed. 

Hansen ended her seven-year term in 1990. The following year, she became an Ontario court judge in Kitchener-Waterloo, and later in Perth, then retired in 2003. Her final years were spent in Ottawa, where she struggled with dementia, supported by a close circle of women friends. She died in 2013.

I sometimes pass her grave marker in Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery, a fine monument that calls her a “woman of many firsts.” And I remember her childhood begun under Nazi rule, with its horrific deprivations, and her hopeful new life in Canada, at first scratched from the soil and then built slowly through low-level jobs. She endured hard times and misogyny, rising to become a skilled lawyer and eventually an effective officer of Parliament, advocating for a free and open democracy. An immigrant’s story of perseverance and success, in other words, and a fitting rebuke to the brutal tyranny of her early years.