So this just dropped last week and it’s worth paying attention to, especially if you’re in Ontario.
Here’s the short version: the Ford government announced it’s proposing to exempt the premier, cabinet ministers, and their offices from Ontario’s freedom of information laws. They’re calling it “modernization.” Sure.
Think about what that actually means in practice. Right now, if a journalist or a regular citizen wants to know how a government decision got made, they can file a Freedom of Information request. It’s not perfect, it’s slow, it’s often frustrating, but it exists. FOIs have been used to uncover stories ranging from the controversial closure of the Ontario Science Centre to the state of Ontario’s jails. It’s one of the only real ways the public gets to see what’s actually happening. And Ford wants to get rid of it, at least for himself and everyone around him.
The part that should really bother people is that the changes will be retroactive. Not just going forward. They’re reaching back to kill requests that are already in motion, including ones tied to the Greenbelt scandal and Ford’s cellphone records.
That last one needs some context because it’s important.
Ford doesn’t use a government issued phone. He conducts government business on his personal cellphone, a number he actually hands out publicly at events. That means calls with developers, lobbyists, donors, staffers, whoever, they’re all happening on a private device that would normally be outside the reach of any FOI request. Global News filed a request specifically for the logs of government related calls on that phone. Not the content of the calls, just the records of who he was talking to and when. The argument being that if you’re doing public business on a private phone, those are still public records.
The reason people care comes down to the Greenbelt. That scandal involved the Ford government removing land from protected Greenbelt status in ways that benefited a small group of developers with close ties to the PC party. The auditor general found the process was deeply irregular. The RCMP launched a criminal investigation. Key staffers resigned. And throughout all of it the question nobody could fully answer was who was talking to who, and when. Ford’s phone records could potentially answer some of that. Who had his ear. Who was calling. When those calls happened relative to key decisions.
A divisional court ruled in January that Ford must release the logs. He lost. Then he lost the appeal. So now he’s changing the law. That’s it. That’s the whole story really, everything else is noise.
The official justification has been kind of all over the place. The minister responsible compared the age of the legislation to the Spice Girls. Crawford said “we didn’t have smartphones, we didn’t have cyber threats, we didn’t have cloud computing” when this legislation was written. Which, ok, but none of that explains why the answer is to make cabinet ministers completely invisible to the public. He just sort of left that part out.
Then Ford got in front of cameras Monday and said the changes are about protecting constituents’ privacy and defending against foreign threats, specifically China.
So in three days we went from modernization, to cabinet tradition, to China. The throughline being that none of it actually addresses why a premier who just lost two court battles over transparency suddenly needs a law that makes him untouchable.
Ontario’s own Information and Privacy Commissioner Patricia Kosseim wasn’t subtle about where she stands. She said if records about government business can be shielded simply because they sit in a minister’s office or on a staffer’s device, “public accountability is eviscerated.” That’s not an opposition politician. That’s the person whose entire job is to protect access to information, calling this shocking and alarming.
And it’s bigger than just Ford and a few ministers. The exemptions would cover parliamentary assistants too, which is basically all but a handful of Ford’s 79 PC MPPs. The whole apparatus, wrapped up and put away where you can’t see it.
The bill gets tabled when the legislature reconvenes March 23. Monday.
I don’t know what’s in those phone records. Nobody does, that’s kind of the point. But a government that loses in court twice and then rewrites the law to make sure it never happens again is telling you something. You just have to be willing to hear it.
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