BC Government Accused of a Stealth Attack on Freedom of Information

The B.C. government is trying to weaken access to information with a bill that’s now before the legislature, say opposition parties and advocates.

Citizens’ Services Minister Diana Gibson says the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Act, 2026, makes minor changes that will make the system work better.

But MLAs with both the Conservative Party of BC and the BC Greens say the bill is part of a long-term erosion of access rights and will make it even harder for people trying to get information from the government.

B.C. Conservative MLA for Langley-Willowbrook Jody Toor said during debate that at first glance the bill seems to make small administrative amendments.

But in fact, Toor said, it makes significant changes that undermine the right to access government information.

“What is at stake here is not administrative language,” she said. “What is at stake is whether this government is prepared to defend transparency or quietly dilute it.”

The bill will not improve transparency and in fact rewrites the rules to limit how and when the public can access information, Toor said.

“British Columbians deserve a government that is open and accountable, not one that controls what information the public can see.... Transparency is what allows citizens, journalists, researchers and future governments to understand how decisions were made and to hold those decisions up to audit.”

BC Green MLA Rob Botterell, who represents Saanich North and the Islands, said that over three decades successive governments have weakened the law. A lawyer, Botterell led the team that drafted the province’s original freedom of information or FOI law that passed in 1992.

“Piece by piece, the system has been dismantled — and Bill 9 continues that trend,” he said. “It degrades freedom of information under the guise of administrative convenience, making the government both judge and juror over what the public can access.”

The current law says an applicant needs to make a written request that “provides enough detail to enable an experienced employee of the public body, with a reasonable effort, to identify the record sought.”

That will be replaced with a new section requiring that the request, “in the opinion of the head of the public body, provides enough detail to enable an experienced employee of the public body, with a reasonable effort and in a reasonable amount of time, to identify the record sought.”

The new language adds in both “the opinion of the head of the public body” and the limitation that identifying the record can be done “in a reasonable amount of time.”

A section requiring the public body to “make every reasonable effort to assist applicants and respond without delay” will be changed so that the assistance is provided “without unreasonable delay.”

Toor noted how the change in language would alter the expectations in other situations, such as getting a vehicle serviced or ordering in a restaurant.

“Before this change, a citizen submitting a request would know that the law required a response without delay,” she said. “That wording set clear belief that the process would move quickly.... The amendment changes that to ‘without unreasonable delay’ and makes the officials themselves the judge of what is and is not reasonable.”

The bill also allows for requests to be disregarded if the applicant’s behaviour is “abusive” or “malicious” or if responding would unreasonably interfere with the operations of the government. Previously the section referred to only the operations of the public body to which the request was made.

“That’s a licence to never respond to anything,” said Botterell. At a time when the government has a $13-billion deficit, is cutting jobs and is juggling other pressures and priorities, he continued, “almost any request would unreasonably interfere with your ability to carry out the operations of government.”

Taken together, Botterell said, the amendments mean there will be no consequences if the government avoids releasing information it doesn’t want to. “In combination they effectively give the government the ability, as far as I’m concerned, to delay or not deal with any request that they find problematic or potentially embarrassing.”

Gibson said giving the heads of public bodies more discretion to decide what’s reasonable will improve how the system functions.

“What we’re doing in a bunch of pieces of this bill is make it a little easier for us to be able to get the right information to people in their hands when they need it,” she said.

“The office of the privacy commissioner will continue to have oversight of any of those pieces of the bill where we’ve given a little bit more discretion so that we can have citizens and the service providers engage around what exactly they need, ensure that they know what it’s going to take to get that information to them in a timely fashion.”

The government is focusing on transparency and much has changed in the more than 30 years since the legislation was created, Gibson said. “Anybody who has email right now knows how much volume there is of information. Email, texts, different services, things like WhatsApp and Signal, there’s so much information.”

The average response has grown to 500 pages, and they often include sensitive information about third parties that needs to be reviewed before release, she said.

“So what we’re doing is ensuring the system is sustainable, the providers can give the exact information people need to them in a way that’s transparent,” she said. “It’s setting reasonable time frames so that people can understand how much time it will take.”

The information and privacy commissioner will continue to oversee everything, she added.

The independent officer of the legislature responsible for protecting privacy and access rights, information and privacy commissioner Michael Harvey, was unavailable for an interview.

Staff referred The Tyee to a statement Harvey’s office released within minutes of Gibson introducing the bill that stressed he was pleased to have been consulted and expressed approval for the changes.

“My office has had many discussions with government in a co-ordinated way to ensure the amendments keep to FIPPA’s [the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act’s] core purposes, and I am encouraged that the proposed changes will be one step forward to getting FOI records into the hands of applicants faster,” he said.

His office has been working with the government to change how extensions are requested, he added, which would also streamline the release of records and increase transparency.

Advocates saw cause for alarm.

“It weakens access rights at a time when government has failed to meaningfully implement its own recordkeeping law,” said the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, adding that several clauses will narrow access to records.

Association president Mike Larsen said in an interview that he hopes the information and privacy commissioner will have more to say about the bill soon, particularly since during debate supporters of the bill have been noting Harvey’s lack of objections.

“For an organization that has a mandate to support freedom of information and transparency, at minimum there are some serious questions that have to be posed about a couple of the clauses in the bill,” he said.

From the Freedom of Information and Privacy Association’s point of view, said Larsen, there are parts of the bill that deserve support, particularly around privacy and connected services, as well as the commissioner’s powers to collaborate with regulators in other jurisdictions.

Other parts of the bill harm access rights, he said. “There’s some really bad stuff in here that I think erodes transparency in British Columbia,” he said. “It shifts the balance of power further away from the requester and towards the government, the head of the public body, in a couple of ways that are really problematic.”

The association says the real cause of FOI delays is “upstream” issues, including inconsistency across ministries on how records are created, classified, retained and digitized.

Botterell said the easy solution is for the government to withdraw the bill, or at least the sections that reduce openness and that may significantly delay the disclosure of records.

Then it should get to work implementing the dozens of recommendations that an all-party committee of the legislature made in 2022 to improve the act, he said, adding that doing so would get the government back to upholding the law’s original intent.