Horns locked over dismal state of access to info
Privy Council Office and info commissioner increasingly at odds
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:
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.