Overview
- Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, Patricia Kosseim, condemned the move as a retroactive rewrite after courts upheld orders to release Premier Doug Ford’s call logs.
- Draft legislation would exclude records of the premier, cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants and their offices from freedom-of-information requests.
- The exemption would apply retroactively and could affect efforts by journalists to obtain documents tied to the Greenbelt controversy and the premier’s cellphone records.
- FOI response deadlines would extend from 30 calendar days to 45 business days, while requests to records held by ministry public servants would still be allowed.
- The government argues the update reflects modern communications and safeguards cabinet secrecy, a claim of alignment with other jurisdictions that opposition figures and some experts dispute.