Vancouver, September 2, 2020 – FIPA is encouraged by the report but discouraged by the climate that gave rise to it. The fact that public bodies have been consistently violating the law is deeply concerning and FIPA urges the BC Government to take this report seriously.    “The NDP ran on a platform favouring stronger FOI law in 2017. We haven’t seen them follow through […]

Stanley Tromp has updated his 2008 book, Fallen Behind: Canada’s Access to Information Act in the World Context. From Stanley Tromp: The first edition of this book in 2008 detailed how Canada’s Access to Information Act had fallen behind the rest of the world’s FOI laws. Since then, the problem has only grown far worse […]

MEDIA RELEASEMarch 30, 2020 Ministry of Citizens’ Services relaxes restrictions on the use of third-party tools and applications to disclose personal information inside or outside of Canada VANCOUVER, March 30, 2020 – In the time of a global emergency, the protection of privacy and access to information rights needs to be kept at the forefront of […]

Privacy violations highlight the need for law reform Earlier this week, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of B.C. (OIPC BC) and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) released a joint investigation report that found a B.C. company violated B.C.’s provincial and Canada’s federal privacy laws. While conducting business on high-profile campaigns […]

Previously, we compared access to information and privacy commitments in the platforms of four of Canada’s major federal political parties. Now, we’ll take a look at what we can expect from a Liberal minority government. With the election results in, we now have greater clarity about how Canada will proceed with access to information and […]

By Stanley Tromp Stanley Tromp is a Vancouver independent journalist and author of the book Fallen Behind: Canada’s Access to Information Act in the World Context. Canada’s Access to Information Act of 1982 is an essential law that allows citizens and the media to obtain government records on many vital topics, such as health and […]

How Canada’s major federal political parties compare on issues related to privacy and access to information The table below uses publicly available information contained within the platforms of Canada’s four major political parties: the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party, and the Green Party. FIPA is a non-partisan organization and this chart […]

From FIPA President Mike Larsen The introduction of the amendments to B.C.’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) contained in section 22 of Bill 35 demonstrate that the government is willing to move forward on legislative reform. And as the all-party special committee who reviewed the Act in 2016 found in their […]

Vancouver, October 7, 2019 –  The Premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, announced late Friday that he has accepted the resignation of the Minister of Citizens’ Services, Jinny Sims, due to an ongoing RCMP investigation into her conduct. At this time, precise details into the nature criminal investigation of Minister Sims are unknown. The former […]

Vancouver, September 26, 2019 – As part of Right to Know Week 2019, Independent journalist Stanley Tromp has published the BC Freedom of Information (FOI) News Story Index. The new resource, which received support from the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, is a database that documents significant news items produced using BC’s FOI […]

It is election season, and the leaders of Canada’s political parties are making promises, presenting platforms, and answering questions about plans and policies. The next Government of Canada will have to take positions on transparency reform, privacy in a digital age, democracy and Big Data, and the regulation of increasingly-intrusive surveillance practices. We want to […]

As we learned in the first episode of Data Subjects, BC’s Freedom of Information laws were created in order to ensure that public records belong to the public, which is a fundamental principle to our democracy. Citizens in a democratic nation must have a right of access to information about their government in order to […]