Carney's office slammed by access-to-info orders
Privy Council Office struggling under huge "burden"
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:
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:
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.
hmm perhaps if they tried answering more questions or telling the press gallery... anything?