Canada’s Access to Information Act Doesn’t Really Provide Canadians with Access to Information

Access to Information Canada

In their recently published book Your Right to Know, journalists Jim Bronskill and David McKie have done yeomans’ work explaining how Canadians can use freedom of information requests to get government secrets. But, at the federal level, it’s work they shouldn’t have needed to do – pointing to another problem with Canada’s broken access to information laws.

Introduced in 1980 by Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals, the Access to Information Act gave Canadians a limited right to request government records. The bureaucracy’s filing cabinets could now metaphorically be opened by anyone – unless the records in them included 75 different kinds of (Read more…)