How much does it cost to get public information out of your provincial government? If you said, nothing, it should be free — oh, you witty little jokester, you know deep in your heart of hearts that such a beautiful thing couldn’t possibly be true in this mess of a modern world.
How about $10? $20? $30? No, thanks to some clever little changes made by the good folks at the B.C. government recently, the true cost to apply for information on what the government is doing has spiked to an eye-watering $280.
The reason is simple: Government no longer helps people get information from across its many ministries. So if you want to know how much the provincial government spent on, say, catered meals for its executives, rent for its offices, travel for its upper managers or consultants for its sensitive files — you are required to file 28 different Freedom of Information requests, to 28 different ministries, offices and secretariats, each with a separate $10 application fee.
It’s a fee escalation that has caught the attention of Information and Privacy Commissioner Michael Harvey, who says while it’s not technically illegal, it’s not the right thing to do either.
“Can the government do this? Yes,” he said in an interview. “Should the government do it? I’d argue what they should do is take a close look at how they respond and find a way to respond to [Freedom of Information requests] that sends a message to the public about transparency.”
The structure makes it prohibitively expensive to do simple but important checks on whole-of-government spending.
For example, Metro Vancouver is now facing serious external reviews, after Global BC’s Jordan Armstrong and Catherine Urquhart started cracking into the per diem fees for meetings, catered lunch costs and outrageous travel trips of local politicians and staff. To accomplish the same thing for the B.C. government — a simple request about how much the province has spent on catered lunches for staff — now requires 28 separate FOI requests with 28 $10 fees.
The City of Richmond launched an internal review last month after Armstrong and Urquhart discovered it had spent more than $73,000 in one year on gift cards to The Keg and Cactus Club restaurants. Want to know how much the B.C. government spent on gift cards? You guessed it, $280. Just to apply. The fees to pull the records are extra.
So how did the government pull this hike off without anyone noticing? It was a series of small changes over time, each innocuous on their own, which added up to a steep bill the public now can’t avoid.
It started with late premier John Horgan’s decision in 2021 to get rid of free information requests, and put in $10 non-refundable fees for every application.
It was a crummy move, opposed by the independent privacy commissioner, Indigenous governments, journalists and a coalition of local organizations that regularly used the FOI process to get vital information, all of whom argued it would harm transparency and accountability.
But the NDP did it anyway, seeing the political gain in stifling the release of information that could turn up embarrassing things about its ministers.
Embedded inside that enabling legislation was a clause that would let all public bodies charge the application fee.
At the time, most of the attention focused on how this opened the door to municipalities, Crown corporations, post-secondary institutions and other public agencies to start charging fees for the first time, to whittle down access to their information too.
As Harvey pointed out in a new report Monday, that did happen. There’s now a fractured and inconsistent landscape for local taxpayers to navigate, with 42 of 160 municipal governments charging fees, and some not even understanding what records they are allowed to release.
While people were fretting about that, the government had an entirely fortuitous and in-no-way-related-whatsoever eureka moment. It realized that technically, under the law, all of its ministries and offices are defined as separate public bodies. Not one government. Twenty-eight separate little governments. Which means, 28 separate $10 fees.
It didn’t have to do this. But once someone figured out the potential for all the red tape and money, there was no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.
“Departments do have discretion, and government does have discretion under the law as it currently stands, not to charge the fee,” said Harvey.
But, he added, “they are in their legal rights to do so.” This is based on the law they passed in 2021.
Two other steps had to be taken to really make the $280 fee unavoidable.
First, government had to stop helping people get access to information it could otherwise find. This involved cutting off requests by using dubious technicalities about who has custody and control of the records.
Reporters have found this repeatedly, where simple requests for emails from officials in one ministry will suddenly be deemed as in the custody of some other ministry or agency, with no explanation why. Your request is then closed. You might as well have set your $10 bill on fire.
The final move was to spiff up the government FOI website, and put in a page where you can’t proceed with just a general request. You have to click on little boxes for each of the 28 “public bodies” you think apply.
There’s all sorts of fun technicalities there.
You can ask for information from the Ministry of Environment and Parks, but if you want anything from the Environmental Assessment Office, which is inside the environment ministry, that’s a totally separate request and fee.
If you need information about Indigenous reconciliation policies, you better hope that your records don’t cross between the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, and the “Declaration Act Secretariat” inside that same ministry (spoiler alert: they will) or your request is toast, and you’ll be starting over next time with two $10 fees.
If you ask the B.C. government, it will insist that nothing has actually changed and all of this is just the way the system has worked since before and after the FOI legislation of 2021.
But everyone who tries to use the broken, dilapidated, much-abused, much-maligned, politically neutered, ramshackle, nonsensical, money-wasting British Columbia Freedom of Information system will tell you that’s simply not true.
It’s broken, borderline-useless, and now monstrously-expensive. And the blame for that lies solely at the feet of the BC NDP government.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 17 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for Glacier Media. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
