FIPA was pleased to have the opportunity to attend the Privacy & Access Council of Canada Wisdom Wednesday Webinar and consider the current state of access in Canada. In preparation for this round table discussion, Jason Woywada, Executive Director, BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association drafted the following potential presentation.
Good morning and thank you to the Privacy and Access Council of Canada for the invitation to present today.
I am presenting from the unseeded Coast Salish Territory of the Lekwungen amongst the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples whose historic relationships with the land continue to this day.
For those unfamiliar with us, the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, or FIPA, is a non-partisan, non-profit organization established in 1991 to promote and defend freedom of information and privacy rights in Canada. While we are based in British Columbia, our membership extends across the country, and we regularly work with partner organizations nationwide.
Our goal is to empower people by increasing their access to information and their control over their personal information. We do that through public education, public assistance, research, and law reform. We are one of the few public interest organizations in Canada devoted solely to advancing access and privacy rights, and we count ourselves in very good company with the people gathered here today with PACC.
Access to information is often described as an administrative process. But it is much more than that. It is one of the core democratic tools that allows the public, including journalists, researchers, civil society, and practitioners, to understand how decisions are made, what risks were known, what advice was given, and whether governments are acting lawfully and in the public interest.
It is one of the foundations on which trust in public bodies is built.
What concerns us right now is that, across Canada, we are seeing a pattern. It is one we have described as a kind of horror show.[1]
Governments continue to speak the language of modernization, efficiency, digital transformation, and service improvement, often framed as efforts to improve timeliness. But too often, the practical effect is the narrowing of access rights through expanded barriers and broader discretion to refuse, delay, or otherwise weaken meaningful access in the first place.[2]
Alberta arguably helped set off this current race to the bottom in late 2024, when it moved to repeal its long-standing Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and replace it with separate access and privacy statutes through Bills 33[3] and 34[4]. Framed as modernization, the package was significant not only because it restructured the law, but because Alberta’s Information and Privacy Commissioner publicly warned that Bill 34 should be reconsidered and amended to preserve a “well-functioning access to information system.”[5]
That warning matters. Once Alberta normalized the idea that access reform could mean expanding administrative control over requests rather than strengthening the public right to know, it offered a model that other governments could follow under the same language of efficiency and modernization.
Nova Scotia followed in 2025, the Legislature amended its access and privacy framework[6]. In Written Report WR25-01 the new review process was used to partially approve a remedy that limits an applicant to one access request per month for 12 months. [7]
That does not mean every reform was negative, but combined with the key messages justifying these changes shows a pervasive narrative of “system strain” is increasingly being answered through new powers to restrict or manage applicant access.⁴
In British Columbia, that pattern is visible this spring in Bill 9, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Act. Among the notable proposed changes are a shift in the duty to respond from “without delay” to “without unreasonable delay,” a change making it a matter for the head of the public body to decide whether a request provides enough detail, and broader grounds for the commissioner to authorize a public body to disregard requests, including where applicant behaviour is considered abusive or malicious or where responding would unreasonably interfere with operations. [8]
Most recently, in Ontario the Information and Privacy Commissioner has warned that proposed changes to Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act would exclude from the law all government records held by the premier, cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants, and their political staff, applying retroactively.[9] That is not a minor housekeeping change. It goes directly to whether the public can scrutinize decision-making at the highest levels of government.
So what are the justifications being used to explain these moves?
Part of the answer is apparently operational pressure. Access systems are under strain. Federally, the Office of the Information Commissioner reported receiving 4,924 complaints in 2024–2025, concluding 5,406 complaints, and carrying an inventory of 2,191 complaints as of March 31, 2025.[10]
We see key messages reflecting similar language in multiple provincial efforts including Alberta[11], Nova Scotia[12], British Columbia[13] ,and Ontario[14].
But operational pressure does not explain the trend. Too often, governments frame the problem as burdensome requests, as though the public’s use of access laws is itself the issue. Once that becomes the narrative, the response is predictable: easier refusal, broader discretion, and narrower entitlement. That shifts responsibility away from public bodies and onto applicants. In many cases, the more likely underlying problems are weak records culture, underinvestment, and poor information management.
For practitioners, the implications of these changes are immediate.
First, the work becomes more legally and strategically complex. Practitioners are increasingly operating in environments where the language of service improvement can mask a shift in the balance between rights and discretion.
Second, records management and access can no longer be treated as separate silos. If records are not created, classified, retained, and retrievable in a disciplined way, access rights become hollow. You cannot disclose what was never documented, and you cannot process efficiently what cannot be found.
Third, practitioners are now on the front line of democratic resilience. In November 2025, Canada’s federal, provincial, and territorial information regulators jointly called on governments to modernize access laws, proactively disclose records, and promote a more robust information ecosystem in an era of misinformation.[15] In other words, timely access to authoritative legitimate public records is not a luxury. It is essential democratic infrastructure.
And that brings me to the broader democratic implications.
When access rights are weakened, the consequences are immediate and concrete. Journalists lose the ability to test official narratives against the record. Researchers lose access to the evidence needed to assess policy, performance, and risk. Civil society loses part of its capacity to scrutinize government action. Legislatures, opposition parties, and watchdog bodies are left with fewer facts on which to ground debate, challenge decisions, and hold institutions to account. And the public is asked to place greater trust in government at the very moment it is being given less basis to do so.
Over time, that changes the culture of government itself. Officials learn that fewer records may mean fewer consequences. Political actors learn that greater opacity lowers risk. And the public learns, correctly, that formal rights on paper may not translate into meaningful access in practice.
So what could or should we be asking for instead?
We need to advocate for modernization that expands access, not contracts it. That means preserving strong statutory response duties. It means narrowing, not broadening, disregard powers. It means improving information management, staffing, and public reporting on performance. It means stronger proactive disclosure. And it means remembering that access is not merely a service transaction. It is a democratic safeguard.
This is not just a theoretical concern for us at FIPA. Our current research speaks directly to it.
We are nearing completion of a multi-year research project examining how public bodies in British Columbia organize information and respond to freedom of information requests.
Since 2023, with researcher Spencer Izen, we’ve been working on an ethnographically informed study of FOI using documents obtained through FOI.[16] We’re examining documents like policies, instruction manuals, guides—anything that attempts to regulate FOI work or teach people how to do it.[17] We are specifically looking at the 56 public bodies subject to both the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and the Information Management Act,[18] and expect the final report to be about 40 to 50 pages. We have preliminary report[19] and aim to publish the full report in May 2026.
My closing point is this: across Canada, the question is no longer whether access systems are under strain. They are. The real question is how governments choose to respond to that strain. Do they fix records, capacity, and transparency culture? Or do they lower the standard of openness and further erode public trust?
When governments close the door on access to information, they do not just make administrations harder to navigate.
They make democracy and civil society harder to sustain.
Thank you. I look forward to the discussion.
Discussion Points
FIPA is involved in a number of legal and policy battles where access to information and privacy rights directly intersect. One of the most pressing concerns is the continued exclusion of federal political parties from meaningful privacy obligations and access rights for Canadians.
[16] BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, “Access Regimes: Social Studies of Recordkeeping, Bureaucracy, and Secrecy under Freedom of Information Law”, online: Open Science Framework https://osf.io/n2xmu/overview
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