Ford government announces retroactive changes to Freedom of Information Legislation - this is not good news

By Gazette Staff

March 17, 2026

BURLINGTON, ON

Last Friday, March 13^th, cabinet minister Stephen Crawford,  Minister of Public and Business Service, Delivery and Procurement, announced some sweeping changes how Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are going to be handled.

For the last four decades, FOI legislation has allowed journalists and members of the public to ask for documents from ministers’ offices and from the Premier’s office.

This is a huge change, and more importantly, it’s going to be retroactive.

Freedom of Information laws have given journalists and the public a window into how government really works, but now the Ford government says it plans to change those rules in a way critics warn could slam that window shut. The province wants to rewrite the laws so records held in the offices of the Premier and Cabinet ministers are no longer accessible through FOI requests. The change would apply retroactively, affecting ongoing battles over documents tied to issues like the Green Belt scandal, the Skills Development Fund and even the Premier’s personal cell phone records.

This is going to impact several of the long-standing battles over public documents.

Journalists and the public won’t get anything from Minister’s offices.

In a Zoom call between Michael Friscolanti: Editor-in-Chief, Village Media and Scott Sexsmith: Podcast Host/Editor at Village Media and  Jessica Smith Cross, the editor in chief at the Trillium Queen’s  Park Bureau,

Michael Friscolanti: What is a Freedom of Information request and is it an important tool in our toolkit, and maybe what that process looks like when filing one.

Jess:  This is a process that’s open to anybody, not just journalists and opposition parties and activists, these are the the people who probably use them the most. You go online and there’s a form that you fill out, you pay $5. Describe the record or records that you’re looking for and where they’re held. It could be the minister’s office or the ministry.

Jessica Smith Cross, the editor in chief at the Trillium Queen’s  Park Bureau.

It could be a university or publicly funded college. There are a lot of institutions that to these requests. Staff will go through and look for those records, and then just make a decision about whether or not they can be released under the Freedom of Information Law, and if they can be sometimes they’re released with redactions, and usually have to pay a fee for the processing time.

If you’re looking for a single record that’s easy to find, it actually might not cost anything. But if you’re asking for big, broad requests, you know all the emails sent by people on this issue within the government, which you can ask for, you could be talking hundreds. We have some requests out on behalf of the trillion that have been giving $1,000 plus price tags.

This has been the practice for more than 30 years. Today’s change is that ministers offices and the Premier’s offices are going to be exempt. Now this isn’t a change that’s happened yet. The province just announced that it’s going to table some legislation that, when passed, will do this. I’m going to get into the weeds a little bit here.

It’s always been off limits to get the documents related to cabinet decisions. The idea behind that is that when the Premier and Cabinet Ministers get together to make big decisions about government policy, they should be able to speak their minds freely and disagree with each other, and nobody gets to know what goes on behind the closed cabinet doors, and that extends to records that would show those deliberations.

And for years, there have been battles between journalists and activists and governments about how broad that cabinet confidentiality should be interpreted. But now the government is saying no, no records held by cabinet ministers at all or the premier, and making that even more complex and worse for us, quite frankly, is they’re doing it retroactively, so all of the requests that are outstanding now, and there are many, are going to have that standard applied once the law passes.

Friscolanti:  Tell us, in a practical way, what this means to people looking for documents?

Jess: we’ve submitted a whole series of requests looking for documents that have to do with the Skills Development Fund scandal. Our interesting listeners probably know about it. This is these training funds that were given out, and we determined it was two people who tended to have some kind of relationship with the government, who had donated money to the government, had used a lobbyist who’s quite friendly with the government, that sort of thing. We’ve been reporting on this. And what we really wanted to see was the emails, the messages that would make that clear and describe that what we know already and add to it, but now, if this law is passed as described, before we get those records back, any of those emails, messages, documents, memos, whatever that are, just in The minister’s office, like the political staff side of things, it would be we won’t get them, so we would still get stuff from the non partisan civil servants who administer the process the program, but it was the political staff in the minister’s office, in the case of this program in particular, who was making the decisions, the decisions that We believe need a lot of public safety.

Friscolanti: That’s the thing that just it blew my mind as I finished watching the press conference. To be able to do that retroactively is going to have a huge impact on these requests that you and others have done, and the money that we’ve spent, and others have spent.

It sure sounds to the average person, that there’s something to hide  – that they’re saying, well, let’s just make it retroactive so we never have to give the journalists these things. What do they say to that? When they were asked that question

“Most people have no idea that FOI exists or how journalists use it, how opposition politicians or advocates use it.

It’s been a complaint of the Privacy Commissioner who oversees all this stuff and journalists for a long time that because of the access to information system, government officials are not actually documenting, thinking their decision making process, they’re avoiding creating records so that records can’t be foied and it’s harder to make good decisions when you’re avoiding things in that way. There’s also this ongoing issue that this law may interfere with government staffers using private email accounts, which they’re not allowed to do, but do anyway have done anyways in attempts to evade the foi system. So by changing it to make sure all political staffers and ministers offices are exempt from the system, they can presumably talk more freely, and we will never know what they’re saying.

Jess:  We don’t need to know that a certain cabinet minister disagreed with a government decision, but is putting on a brave face in front of the public, that’s politics, and that’s okay. But if you have you know political staffers in their office talking about the political ramifications of something that should be, something that the public could be aware that they’re talking about the drawbacks to a policy, if they’re, you know, saying something they really shouldn’t be said. And maybe the public should know,

Michael Friscolanti: Editor-in-Chief, Village Media

Friscolanti:Have you spoken any experts who think there could be a legal challenge here?

Jess: I have not been able to do that yet. Though, I think that’s a really good idea overall. When the province passes the province has a right to set the law. It’s what it can do. There are times when this government has gotten in trouble with the court challenging its decision decisions.

Friscolanti: Sure, it’s the retroactive nature of it, too. That’s where I wonder, like, how, whether there’s legal grounds to be able to say that this for sure going forward you can make this change, but how, whether it can impact these previous one but you’re right. This is something can be something that they’ll be talked about in the days to come. How do you think the public will react to this? Jess, that’s a key thing to idea. The Ford government’s obviously making this announcement on a Friday morning. Are they just hoping that this blows over? And do you think that this is the kind of thing that the public will care enough about? Friday is the day for news dumps.

Jess: I think that some people care. I can tell that, because there’s been a reaction to our first breaking news story audit already. These are people who really are highly involved in politics, who care about politics and follow it closely. The gist of the decision is pretty easy to understand. Even if you’ve never filed an foi request, you understand what the government is doing here, as for the general level of engagement in politics, some people may hear it and be like, oh, yeah, that’s politicians for you.

Jess: We’ve done all sorts of requests, but we’ve purposefully filed a handful of some really broad ones. We asked for all communications that were in the labor Minister’s office or the offices of the deputy minister and associate at the Associate Deputy Minister level, all communications about the awarding of these of this money to a handful of different groups, the ones that have been in the news, in our news stories, and what why we did it so broad is because we were hoping to get a glimpse of the why, right? Why did the minister’s office award money to these groups, and in many cases, after the Civil Service had said, Actually, these groups aren’t the most deserving in the province, the minister came in decided to award some grants anyway. So we are looking for any, anybody who had written down the why that happened, or what the consequences could could be. So that request spanned both the political Minister’s office staff and senior civil servants when this law change goes through, assuming it does anything that was just in the political staff’s hands but never made it to the civil servants discussing this stuff, I don’t think we will get any more. We should get stuff that is helped by the civil servants. Still that shouldn’t change as a result of this

Jess: One really interesting one is about an ongoing court case. Global News asked for the Premier’s cell phone records for a particular span of time. This was a really interesting one. Ususually, politicians have government issued phones that they use for government business. The premier uses his personal phone for government business. So after foi ing the government phone that had no records, they foi for the Premier’s personal cell phone records related to government business, and it actually won with the Information Privacy Commissioner and then the Divisional Court in its efforts to get those cell phone records to find out who the premier was talking to in this particular week of time. Now, if this law goes forward unchallenged, it would. It should, in theory, cut that off completely.

Friscolanti: It still amazes me. They can just do that on a Friday morning.

Friscolanti: It still amazes me. They can just do that on a Friday morning. Jess just explain to people why information is so important to our democracy, to the way we do business, why it’s so important that government records are accessible to the public, not just journalists, but the public as a whole,

Jess: The government makes decisions that are incredibly impactful in all of our lives. They have incredibly large communications teams that they use to sell those decisions to the public in the best and most flattering light. I’ve been a journalist for a long time now, and there is always more to the story than what they’re going to tell you willingly, and it’s our job as journalists to find out what they don’t want to tell us.

Access to Information laws is one big way that we can do that, to find the other side of the story that the politicians aren’t going to want to tell you willingly. Sources help. You know analysis of open documents helps too, but fois are a big part of that as why this decision makes me sad. It’s gonna make that job harder.

I knew there was something going.  It’s another element of sneakiness.

On Monday, Premier Doug Ford said he is tightening Ontario’s access to information laws to “protect” himself and his cabinet ministers from “communist China” and other hostile powers. After it was announced the government would be excluding the records of the premier, ministers and parliamentary assistants and their aides from those released under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA), Ford defended the move.