Canada

During the 2015 federal election campaign, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau vowed to make sweeping changes to access to information. Those changes would have included bringing ministers’ offices – including his own – under access law and making the government “open by default.”

Those and other access commitments in the Liberal Party’s 2015 platform were never adopted, though the government eventually made some changes to federal access law as part of Bill C-58, including abolishing all charges for requests beyond the initial $5 filing fee.

Michel Drapeau, a lawyer and one of the country’s leading experts on federal access to information laws, was frustrated that the government has delayed taking action on recommendations and instead promised to once again review access to information in 2025.

“I am convinced that the bulk of the reasons explaining the impossible delays and backlogs now faced by the [access] system is fixable right now without further study,” said Mr. Drapeau, who testified during the hearings last October.

Freelance journalist and access expert Dean Beeby told The Globe that the government’s response amounted to a dismissal of the committee’s work. “This is just a complete brush-off of the committee, and it’s a brush-off of all the people who appeared before the committee who were just asking for basic problems to be fixed,” he said.

Mr. Beeby testified at the House committee last December. During his appearance, he noted that the committee’s study was at least the 16th review of federal access to information legislation.

“In this country, we love to study transparency laws thoroughly to ensure we don’t actually get around to fixing them,” Mr. Beeby said at the time.