Ged Baldwin's 50-year-old crusade for freedom of information legislation in Canada
Alberta MP's private member's bill in 1974 got the process started
This year is a milestone for government transparency in Canada, marking 50 years since an obscure politician from Western Canada finally got some traction in his crusade for a national freedom-of-information law.
Ged Baldwin (1907-1991), a lawyer and Progressive Conservative MP for Alberta’s Peace River riding, has been called the father and grandfather of the federal Access to Information Act, which passed in 1982. He was awarded an Order of Canada for his tenacity on the file.
In 1974, Baldwin introduced a private member’s bill in the House of Commons, the Right to Information Act. The proposal was inspired by similar laws in Sweden and the United States, countries he had visited to gather ideas. Baldwin had failed to get the bill beyond second reading in five earlier attempts, starting in 1971, but got lucky on his sixth try.
A New Zealander by birth, Baldwin immigrated to Alberta as a boy, and became a criminal defence lawyer after apprenticing in his father’s law office. In 1958, he was elected to Parliament in the John Diefenbaker landslide. He was returned to the Commons in every subsequent election until his retirement in 1980.
As a newly elected MP for the winning party in 1958, Baldwin was shocked to find himself snubbed by Ottawa’s clubby, insular bureaucracy. He fought hard for his rural constituents, demanding better rail service and cut-rate shipping for canola harvests. But the pencil-pushers denied him any useful government information to advance his causes.
“I arrived in Ottawa, confidently expecting doors to swing open, civil servants to flood me with information … I was met with closed doors. … right from the start we could not get hold of data in the records of government departments,” he later recalled.
“This was a pattern I was to see repeated time after time in my years in the House of Commons.”
Other backbenchers experienced similar rebuffs from public servants. One MP – New Democrat Barry Mather, a former journalist – introduced a private member’s bill on freedom of information in 1965, designed to cut through the reflexive obstruction of governments. It failed, and again in at least seven other attempts, through to his retirement in 1974. Mather’s bill nevertheless marked the first legislative bid for a freedom-of-information regime in Canada.
Baldwin’s bill was more substantial than Mather’s, and designed to go further than the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, which had been passed in 1966 and strengthened in 1974. “I am attempting, by this bill, to reverse the practice that exists in Canada, namely, that no information is given by the government unless it sees fit to do so,” he said during second-reading debate in 1974.
Baldwin was supported in the debate by the NDP’s Stanley Knowles; by Lincoln Alexander, a Progressive Conservative; and by Liberal John Reid, parliamentary secretary to the president of the Privy Council. Reid proposed that Baldwin’s bill be withdrawn in favour of a larger government-supported study of the issues by a joint Commons-Senate committee. All agreed, including Baldwin.
That rare consensus set the ball in motion. The joint committee’s report was followed by a 31-page cabinet memorandum (1976); by government legislation introduced by Joe Clark’s administration, which fell in 1979; and finally by a Liberal government bill in 1980, which became law in 1982.
Through that eight-year gestation, Baldwin kept up the pressure. He spent $2,000 of his own money (about $12,000 today) to help fund multi-city rallies, which attracted such luminaries as Pierre Berton. He brought together diverse groups (reporters, unionists, academics, lawyers, consumers) in a coalition pressing for a transparency law.
Baldwin left politics in 1980, but continued to agitate for reform of the 1982 law, which he felt had been watered down by bureaucrats, by the provinces, and by Pierre Trudeau, who removed public access to cabinet documents from the final version of the bill.
Liberal John Reid (1937-2022) had spoken favourably in 1974 about Baldwin’s bill, though remained hesitant. “It is difficult to know what the balance should be in respect of releasing information,” he said in second-reading debate. “I do not know where the balance should be.”
Reid and Baldwin later traveled together to Stockholm to learn more about Sweden’s freedom-of information regime. The Liberal MP became a believer. Reid was appointed Canada’s information commissioner in 1998 for a seven-year term, and was a dogged critic of government secrecy.
Baldwin, though, is the undisputed engine for freedom-of-information in Canada. He cajoled, argued, buttonholed, harangued, hassled, exhorted and generally made a nuisance of himself. Baldwin kept the federal project on the rails, stirring up enough public pressure to finally get a law onto the books.
“We don’t get the truth. People are conned and manipulated,” Baldwin said in 1984, looking back at his struggles. “Public servants [are] in receipt of a lot of information which they never circulate.”
“I saw it [the Act] as an overall weapon with which to challenge the dangers of … government supremacy.”
This is a great footnote to Geds life and times. Well written, accurate and manages to truly capture the spirit of Ged, my grandfather. I worked on Parliament hill from 1979 on when his Freedom of Information bill was introduced, dropped, picked up again by a different government and ultimately passed by a reluctant Parliament. He truly was a servant of all Canadians, who believed one person could make a difference for the betterment of all. A Don Quixote of his times, tilting at windmills until they finally fell. Thank you Dean.