Bob Mackin
First the B.C. NDP government tabled a bill to give bureaucrats the power to arbitrarily delay and deny freedom of information requests.
Then it quietly stopped publishing the calendars of top officials and lists of contracts with government suppliers.
A March 11 update to the Open Information website says it is “transitioning to a modernized system,” so Proactive Disclosures are temporarily paused.
BC Liberal Minister of Finance Mike de Jong announcement proactive disclosures in May 2016. (BC Gov/Flickr)
What it is
Under section 71 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, public bodies must designate categories of records to be published without an FOI request.
The Open Information website is a legacy of the former BC Liberal government, which directed bureaucrats in 2016 to publish Ministers’ and Deputy Ministers’ calendars, directly awarded contracts, ministers’ travel receipts and summaries of contracts with values over $10,000.
“Not technically feasible”
The NDP stopped publishing Proactive Disclosures during the pandemic and last fall’s B.C. General Employees’ Union strike. The most-recent calendars are from December 2025, while no-bid contract lists are current as of November 2025.
A representative of the Ministry of Citizens’ Services, Laura Casselman, sent theBreaker.news a prepared statement that said the March 11 notice is for a “temporary, one-time pause to support the technical migration” to the new FOI Mod system by early April. The current system relies on manual processes and outdated technology, said the statement.
“It is not technically feasible to maintain publishing on the current system while transitioning to the new one.”
MLA Gavin Dew. (Hansard TV)
Pattern of secrecy
The Conservative critic for Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation and Artificial Intelligence called the temporary pause “pretty disturbing.”
“That’s also inconsistent with how virtually any consumer-facing web project is done by anybody else,” Gavin Dew (Kelowna-Mission) said in an interview.
Generally, a new version of a website is developed in a so-called “sandbox environment” and then the website address is transferred to the new version when ready to launch, Dew said.
“Well, it reminds me a little bit of when we all found out that Small Business BC had died because there was suddenly a message on their website, and government basically had swept it under the rug during an election,” Dew said. “It’s also reminiscent of the Merit Commissioner, so effectively you’ve got a budget that killed the Merit Commissioner shortly after it had been funded. You’ve got an interruption of the flow of information through proactive disclosure, and you’ve got a bill that fundamentally destroys the FOI regime that is a legacy of Mike Harcourt NDP government, all in the same short period of time.
“There’s a theme here.”
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