Liberal government's addiction to secrecy

Latest proposed reforms to access-to-info are largely regressive

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.