Ontario journalists quitting freedom-of-info

Provincial stats suggest media giving up on FOI requests just like federal counterparts

Journalists in Canada have long been minor users of freedom-of-information laws, for reasons that aren’t hard to fathom.

Reporters are a practical bunch, and FOI delivers results unreliably and after a long wait. Many decided long ago that it’s not worth the hassle.

Recent federal statistics suggest that even the hardy few who do file requests are abandoning the Access to Information Act, so the already low take-up is getting worse.

Ottawa’s data collection on who uses the federal law is shaky, but the trend seems clear enough: as the access-to-information system becomes more dysfunctional, more reporters are giving up in frustration.

Is the same decline happening with provincial freedom-of-information requests? Are reporters who focus on provincial issues also turning their backs on this document-based branch of investigative journalism?

The Ontario government publishes annual data on media use of its FOI laws, which generated more than 31,000 general requests from all sources in 2022, the last for which stats are available. The data are not perfect. “Media” is never defined, for example, and designating the source is left up to individual institutions, with little guidance.

Even so, it’s clear there’s also been a decline in media requests in Ontario.

In 2022, there were 1,090 requests identified as originating with the media (about a fifth the number under the federal law that year).

That total is down sharply from the peak years of 2016 to 2019, when the annual average was about 1,350. The number of requests has rebounded somewhat from the troubled COVID years (2020-2021). But in 2022 the media filed just 3.5 per cent of all requests received, down from an average of more than four per cent in those peak years.

As with the federal system, Ontario media for many years have been minor FOI players. Now the numbers are dropping further. What’s going on?

A clue may be found in the targets of the requests. Three perennial media favourites in Ontario are the City of Ottawa, the City of Toronto and the Toronto Police Service. These entities typically attract the most requests from reporters using Ontario’s municipal FOI law. That’s not surprising given that these two cities are media hubs and are the biggest population centres in the province.

Ontario’s other FOI law, covering provincial institutions, is used by reporters especially to target the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Transportation, and the Ontario Provincial Police.

In 2019 and 2020, though, something unusual happened. A flurry of FOI requests from the media arrived at the Cabinet Office, 154 in the first year and 128 in the second. The sudden interest in cabinet clearly coincided with the election of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government in June 2018. The number of requests received by the Cabinet Office then fell off sharply in 2021 and 2022.

My guess is that the initial volleys of media requests to the Cabinet Office turned out to be mostly duds. Cabinet confidences, after all, are tightly protected from public scrutiny under Ontario’s laws, just as they are at the federal level. Perhaps reporters learned first-hand in 2019 and 2020 just how ineffective the legislation was for their purposes, and withdrew from making further requests. A kind of once burned, twice shy.

I asked Ontario’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for comment on the trend. The response: “Our office cannot speculate on the reasons contributing to the lower percentage of access requests from media compared to other sources.” 

Whatever the reason, Ontario journalists do appear to be losing patience with the delays and meager results of FOI requests. Or it may be that as the news industry shrinks, there are fewer reporters left to file. Or it may be that governments are winning the long game, throwing up so many fresh obstacles to transparency that reporters are packing up and going home.

Back in 1976, the Pierre Trudeau cabinet was told that a proposed freedom-of-information law for Canada would be of little value to journalists, based on the U.S. experience of the 1966 American law:

“[T]he large majority of journalists who work to fairly short deadlines find the administrative machinery involved is too cumbersome to be of immediate and consistent use in their day-to-day work,” says a cabinet memo.

That observation almost half a century ago has indeed stood the test of time.