The Decibel - Why holding government to account in Ontario could get harder

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Late last week, the Ontario government announced it would introduce legislation exempting the Premier, cabinet ministers and their offices from responding to freedom of information requests. The province said these changes are needed to protect privacy and to allow ministers to discuss policy decisions in confidence. Critics say it’s an anti-democratic move designed to shield the government from accountability. Jeff Gray reports on Ontario politics for the Globe. He’s on the show to talk about how freedom of information requests have revealed past controversies in Ontario, and how the proposed changes could make government business less transparent to the public. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Government transparency in Canada's most populous province could get a lot foggier. Late last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford's government announced they're bringing in changes to the province's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that would exempt the Premier and Cabinet ministers from being subject to freedom of information requests, also known as FOIs. So today, we're talking to Jeff Gray. He reports on Ontario politics for the globe. He'll explain what exactly the Ontario government is proposing, why they say they need to change these rules, and what kind of impact it could have on holding the government to account.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Jeff, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. So, Jeff, just to start, what do freedom of information laws, or FOI for short, in Ontario, let you do exactly? And why do people use them? So you can file a request. It normally costs five bucks and you send it off to the government department you are interested in where you think the records that you're looking for, the documents that you want to see are housed. Journalists obviously use this.

The opposition uses this. Activists, advocacy groups use this. And sometimes private citizens who sometimes need to use it to get documents even about themselves sometimes. But mostly what we're talking about here is sort of the media or opposition advocates looking to get an inside look at how a government decision was made, how the government was influenced. And there's a whole range of documents that you can request. Okay. So this is access to government held records. And so it can give you access to things like ministries, like the Ministry of Education, Health, police services, municipal governments, school boards.

So there's like a wide array of different things that people can get access to. Right. Now, of course, there are lots of exemptions. So you can't get access to everything. There are a broad range of things for good reason that won't be released to the public personal information, all that sort of thing. So you can't get access to kind of personal information of a person. So in that case, that would be redacted on a document. Yeah. And there are many, many other categories of redactions and some of them are very broad, you know, advice to government. So any decision, any discussion in cabinet obviously is subject to secrecy still. So there are lots of restrictions on it. But on paper, the idea is, hey, I pay for this government with my taxes. So these documents that are created by this government, these decisions that are being made in my name, I should be able to see these things.

I own these things as a citizen, right? That's the sort of on paper, the ideal of all these different freedom of information laws that we have across the country. and in other countries. The idea is that by default, government documents should belong to the people because the government works for the people. And when we talk about government documents, what are we referring to here? Are like emails, that kind of thing? So it can be anything. Yeah.

Emails and it's been broadened obviously in recent times. So, you know, text messages even. But reports and memos, briefing notes, and, you know, an analysis that's been done about a certain policy or suggesting courses of action. the impact of different government policies, all these kinds of things are meant to be accessible through feed of information. Okay. So that gives us kind of a broad sense of what we could get from an FOI request. Can you give us some examples of stories where we learn something significant through requesting

information through FOIs in Ontario? So one important distinction to make here is that under the changes, you will still be able to file FOIs. Okay. But the Premier's office, cabinet ministers, and the government's parliamentary assistance, that almost encompasses all of Doug Ford's MPPs, them in their offices will be exempt. Okay.

So there's been a series of big stories in Ontario politics over the past several years. Many of them have involved freedom information requests. Immediately the one that comes to mind is the Greenbelt, which was a controversy in which the government suddenly announced that it was going to take land owned by a small number of developers out of its protected Greenbelt area and allow housing on that land. And it was later revealed through the Auditor General and the integrity commissioner that that move would have meant a windfall in the billions in increased land value for a small number of developers. And then a whole bunch of media outlets and the opposition parties filed FOIs. And information came, to be fair, from a variety of different sources that told a story about the Greenbelt that was very different than the one the government was telling about when political aides,

when they met with developers, when land exemptions were suggested, all sorts of facts started to come out. In that one as well, like the government came under quite a bit of scrutiny and then eventually reversed their decision on opening those swaths of land. Right, right.

And to show just how important FOI access to the inner workings of a government can be, we have a couple of good examples of the lengths to which governments have gone to try and evade FOI, scrutiny. If you go way back to the previous liberal government, one of the things that harmed it was a scandal over its canceling of gas plants to gas plants that were going to be built, cost a billion dollars. And a top aide to then Premier Dalton McGinty was later served

with a jail sentence for destroying emails inside the Premier's office. And more recently, in the Greenbelt affair, the information and privacy commissioner found that government aides had used code names to avoid using the word green belt, one of them being G asterix, so that the FOI search couldn't find the word green belt and those emails wouldn't make it into the public. Yeah, so it sounds like FOIs kind of give us a more fulsome view of what was going on in terms of controversies like you mentioned here. Yeah, and it can reveal things that are inconvenient.

for a government to have to address. Okay. So, Jeff, you mentioned that the government has introduced this proposed legislation that looks to change how FOI's work in Ontario. Can we get into some detail here? Like, what are they talking about changing here? So this will basically build a wall around the premier and his office, all cabinet ministers and their offices,

and a large number of the PC parties, MPPs, who have been appointed parliamentary assistance. And when you say build a wall, what do you mean? So you won't be able to FI anything inside those offices. You will still be able to get documents that may have originated in those offices, but that are now housed in the bureaucratic side. So there's the ministry of whatever, Ministry of Labor, Ministry of Finance. And then there's the minister's office that is staffed by political staff.

Okay. So the apolitical bureaucratic side, deputy minister on down, that will still be subject to the current FOI system. Why does the Ontario government say that these changes are necessary? So they give a couple of reasons. One is that this legislation dates back to 1988. It has been updated at various times since then, but the overall framework does date back to then.

And so they say, look, you know, that's the minister said it was 10 years before the Spice Girl, What does that matter, though? What does it matter if it dates back to 1988? Well, those of us who were around will remember that no one had a cell phone. Okay. Except for maybe like stockbrokers or somebody like that. And there were no text messages. There were no emails.

So there's an incredible volume of information and documents that are now subject to FOI that weren't then. On the other hand, there was also no Microsoft teams, no Zoom calls, all that sort of stuff. But back then there were meetings, minutes, landlines, and phone records, you know, memos. More things were probably written down, but not as much sort of printed material or text that you'd see now in just the volume of emails that are produced. So that's a fair point, that things have changed dramatically. And it has become, it is quite difficult to administer this system. There's also a point that the government makes around privacy, right? Can you get into that?

So the impetus for a lot of this, critics will say, is a case that involves the Premier's personal cell phone. And global news and a doctor as an individual who's a critic of the Premier and has his own reasons for seeking this. They both filed FOI requests for the Premier's cell phone records. They wanted to see who the Premier was talking to and when. and they say that his personal cell phone is being used for government business, which is pretty much an established fact. The Premier is an unusual figure in Canadian politics and that he hands out his cell phone number at meetings, at events.

He will tell people his phone number, and he gets thousands of text messages and calls. It's obviously part of his sort of political brand. But under the rules, if you're using your cell phone for government business, it's F-O-Iable. Okay. So they were asking. for access to call logs made on his private cell phone.

Yes. Right. And the information and privacy commissioner said, yep, you need to hand those over. We're going to go through them to find out which ones are personal business and which ones are government business. And then eventually they would release the ones that have been deemed government business. And they challenged that in court. The government lost.

The government said it was going to seek to appeal that. And then it decided to move the goalposts and render that appeal unnecessary. because not only will future requests for things like the premier cell phone records be not on the table, but the bill, if it passes, would also be retroactive. So any previous requests, anything that's still working its way through the system, would be dead on arrival, including his personal cell phone. We'll be right back. So Ford argues here that allowing access to his personal cell phone has something to do with privacy

and privacy concerns. What is this argument there? Right. He's said this a couple of times. He says, look, people phone me. They tell me their personal stories. They talk about problems they've had with the health system, with their health. And I don't want all that personal stuff out there.

The existing FOI system would exempt all of those things. I was going to ask you to see, have a point when it comes to privacy. But it sounds like there are already laws that would protect that. Right. So that is not, that doesn't make sense anybody who knows how the FOI system works. Same with their assertion that they need to better protect cabinet secrecy, also pretty much protected from the searchlight of FOI currently. And the information in privacy commissioners is quite critical of this, basically saying that the government lost in court and decided to basically move the goalposts, change the rules of the game so that it erases that loss. Yeah, let's talk about what critics have said about this legislation.

What are they saying about Ford's proposed legislation to change these FOI laws? So the opposition obviously has come out very strongly against it. Marrett Stiles, who's the leader of the NDP in Ontario, said basically only a government that had something to hide would change FOI laws. And the liberal said much the same thing. and we've also heard from, you know, various advocates of a sort of government openness, saying this is a major step backwards. And some of them are calling it anti-democratic, right? What do they mean by that?

Yeah, I mean, I think the idea in a democracy is you should be able to see who your government's talking to, why your government's making decisions. And again, that idea that the government works for you. So the documents are yours and you should be able to see them. You know, and that's how you keep how the opposition or advocates or citizens can also hold their government to account. Often FOIs reveal that the government was warned that a policy that it was going to implement would end up going badly and it did it anyway. And so to have your hands on the warning that it got and didn't heed, you know, that that's informative for citizens, right, in making their political decisions about which government they're going to support. support. Jeff, one of the arguments from the Ford government about why they want to adopt

this legislation is that Ontario is one of the only provinces that allows documents and emails from cabinet ministers and the premier to be subject to FOIs. So what is the lay of the land across Canada when it comes to freedom of information? So more or less, yeah, that is one of the rationales they brought up and that more or less is correct. Ontario is an outlier. Nova Scotia also has a similarly open system. So in most other provinces and the federal government, most documents that are contained inside a cabinet minister's office or the premier or the prime minister's office are not eff viable.

But of course, people who advocate for a more open government say, that's no excuse for Ontario to go backwards. The other guys should go in the same direction as Ontario. So, but that is, they've used that line a number of times and said, this change brings us in line with the other places across the country. This may be an obvious question, but what do we lose in Canada when things become less transparent? You know, the ability to criticize what a government's doing, you know, depends on some of that information. The work that journalists do, the work that advocates and activists do that work. on particular issues is to the extent that you can't get that information is curtailed.

And that means governments are harder to hold to account. I mean, governments have immense power to sort of shape what information enters the public sphere, how it enters, how, you know, they have armies of people that craft their messages in ways that are designed to persuade people, that everything is going pretty well. And, you know, citizens, I think, are entitled to look at, to have a look at information that maybe presents a different picture or shows what information the government had before it when it made a particular decision. In Ontario, we'll still be able to FOI government decision-making materials of reports that have been produced by the bureaucracy. We just won't be able to get at communication that happens inside the highest offices in the case. government. So let's talk about what happens next year. Is this legislation a sure thing?

Doug Ford has a very healthy majority. He won an election last year, third consecutive majority. So if the government wants to do something, it can do it fairly quickly. And so given the personal interest that the premier's taken, particularly in this issue because of his cell phone, I mean, it is possible that this bill would be subject to committee hearings and it could be they can always amend things or change things. This is a government that has often backed off very controversial things when the heat was turned on. We mentioned the Greenbelt. There have been other examples. But they have not been shy but using the tools that they have to force things through the legislature without the normal committee or scrutiny or, and limit the time for debate. and they can basically ram something through in a matter of days if they really put their minds to it.

And so I think it's a safe assumption that this is going to go ahead. If another party were to come into power, how easily could they change it back? Oh, quite easily. You could, again, with the same tools, if another party had a majority, you could reverse it very quickly. Maybe I've been a journalist too long and I don't want to be too cynical about it, but I feel like parties in opposition might jump up and down and say, this is a terrible thing and we would like to have our emails when we're in government subject to FOI. But once they're in government, they may see it differently.

And it's hard to reverse a decision like this that goes backwards on government secrecy. And an example of that, of course, is that Justin Trudeau running for office in 2015 had promised that he would expand the federal system to include the prime minister's office and captain ministers. And then when he was elected, I forgot about that. Well, Jeff will end it there then. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. That was Jeff Gray, a Queens Park reporter for the globe. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our intern and associate producer is Finn Dermot. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin, and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.