Briefly: Conservative leader John Rustad vows to reform B.C.’s freedom of information system.
In an interview with Jordan Peterson, the main challenger to the NDP said he would “make all of the information that can be made public, public.”
Instead of improving the law, the NDP government imposed a $10 application fee. The Information and Privacy Commissioner found the NDP frequently broke the law by delaying disclosure of records for more than six months.
Bob Mackin
The leader of the Conservative Party of B.C. is promising a radical change to fix the freedom of information system if he upsets the governing NDP in the Oct. 19 election.
During an interview with psychologist and commentator Jordan Peterson that debuted Sept. 3, John Rustad said he wants to “change politics forever in British Columbia” and vowed to make public records open by default.
Conservative leader John Rustad (right) on Jordan Peterson’s podcast (Peterson/YouTube)
“You have all this information, which is public information, and if you want it, you have to pay a certain amount of money, and you can apply to access it,” Rustad said during the Aug. 15-recorded interview. “Months later, you might get some redacted document that you get. I’m going to change that. I’m going to get rid of freedom information requests, because I’m going to make all of the information that can be made public, public. The job of the freedom information officer should be to say what can’t be made public.”
Since November 2021, when John Horgan was premier and David Eby the attorney-general, the NDP government has charged a $10 application fee for requests. Applicants are entitled to the first three hours of service at no charge and records are supposed to be disclosed within 30 business days, but the law includes numerous exceptions to disclosure and extensions to deadlines.
“Give the people the facts, give them the information and then it’s no longer politicians that are giving spin, but politicians that are responding to the facts, and you can judge political parties based on facts, as opposed to based on whatever spin they’re giving,” Rustad told Peterson.
Rustad said such a new approach would help restore confidence in government institutions “that’s being lost and continually eroded, particularly because of what’s going on with the politics of the left.”
Michael McEvoy, who was B.C.’s Information and Privacy Commissioner until his term ended in the spring, found the $10 fee was not used for cost-recovery, but a barrier to information that led to declines in requests from media, political parties and individuals.
The charge and other controversial 2021 amendments to the law garnered the NDP government the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Code of Silence award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy in 2022.
Moreover, McEvoy found in a January report that the NDP had continuously broken the law. The government was taking an average 85 business days to respond to requests, the worst performance since McEvoy’s office began reporting on timeliness of responses 13 years earlier.
In 5,100 cases between 2020 and 2023, government exceeded deadlines without legal authority. By the 2022-23 fiscal year, applicants were forced to wait an average 192 additional business days for a response.
During his time in the BC Liberal opposition, Rustad was a member of an all-party committee that recommended numerous changes to improve the FOI law in 2022. The NDP did not adopt the recommendations.
Originally elected in 2005 to represent the Nechako Lakes riding, Rustad was the aboriginal relations and reconciliation minister from 2013 to 2017 under Premier Christy Clark. He was briefly forests minister after the 2017 election until the Green-supported NDP minority defeated Clark on a confidence vote.
The NDP had promised to improve the law after the BC Liberals’ 2015 “triple delete” scandal. Then-commissioner Elizabeth Denham found widespread deleting of records that were supposed to be released to FOI requests.
Federally, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised in the 2015 Liberal platform to make records open by default. That never happened. While he maintained the $5 application fee, but the Liberal government stopped federal offices from charging additional fees.
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