Reforming the Access to Information Act.

• Author: Bryden, John

The recent imbroglio surrounding the Access to Information Commissioner's request for the Prime Minister's agenda books and the Privacy Commissioner's attack on that request provide a dramatic illustration of the need to overhaul Canada's federal freedom of information and privacy legislation. This article, by a long-time advocate of Access to Information reform, looks at the recent and unusual controversy between two officers of Parliament as well as the larger issue of what needs to be done to improve the laws they are charged to uphold.

In response to a complaint from someone who had been denied access to the Prime Minister's agenda books, Information Commissioner John Reid took the Prime Minister's Office to federal court, as he is entitled to do by the access legislation, asking that he be allowed to examine the agendas to determine whether withholding them was justified. The Commissioner's application was upheld and the PMO's appeal has gone to the Supreme Court. At the time of this writing, the ruling of the Supreme Court was still pending.

The contretemps between the Information Commissioner and the PMO pales into insignificance when compared with the Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski's public reaction to it. In an open letter of May 10, 2001, the Privacy Commissioner portrayed himself as the "champion" of the "legitimate privacy rights of every Canadian, whether it be an unemployed labourer or the Prime Minister of our country" and went on to inform the Information Commissioner that "your pursuit of agendas is totally unacceptable."

Even though it is absolutely extraordinary and in my view improper for one officer of Parliament to directly criticize another, the Privacy Commissioner did not hesitate to be condescendingly censorious: "Sometimes it is tempting for those of us in positions of some authority to try to do things simply because we can; it is very important to resist that temptation."

The Privacy Commissioner argued that agendas are protected from the reach of the Access to Information Act because they "are information not about government programs or policies, but about an individual.... They are about an individual's activities, contacts and whereabouts - whom he meets, whom he telephones, where and when he gets a haircut, with what friends he has lunch ..." He concluded that it is tantamount to "information rape" to subject any individual - including the Prime Minister - to the equivalent of "the eye of a TV camera that broadcasts his every move." Poor Prime Minister!

The difficulty with that argument is that agendas have been accessed in the past by deleting personal information. Nothing deterred, the Privacy Commissioner broadened the definition of personal information beyond the Privacy Act, claiming that an agenda "in its entirety ... is by its nature...