Premier Doug Ford’s daily calendar is no longer accessible through Ontario’s FOI system after changes excluding ministers’ office records.
Premier Doug Ford’s daily calendar is no longer available to the public through Ontario’s freedom-of-information system after recent changes to the province’s access law took effect, CBC News reported.
The shift matters because Ford has not routinely provided media outlets with a daily itinerary of his public events since taking office in 2018. CBC News reported it had instead used freedom-of-information requests to obtain the premier’s calendar, typically with some redactions. A request rejected late last month confirmed those records are now outside the law’s reach.
The amendments to Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act were announced in March and came into force in late April. They exclude records held by ministers, parliamentary assistants and their offices from access legislation. The province has said the changes are intended to modernize the system and bring Ontario in line with other jurisdictions that have explicit protections for cabinet ministers’ records.
Transparency advocates quoted by CBC criticized the move, arguing that existing provisions already protected cabinet confidences and other sensitive information from disclosure. James Turk, director of the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University, called the exclusion of Ford’s calendar “mind boggling” and said the public has a right to know what the premier does and whom he meets.
“The media are the public's eyes and ears and basically he's putting a blindfold on them,” Turk said.
Alasdair Roberts, a University of Massachusetts Amherst public policy professor who studies freedom-of-information laws, described the changes as “offensive to the principle of transparency.” He said strong access laws should allow governments to withhold some information while preserving an independent check on whether secrecy is justified.
Ford’s office did not respond to CBC’s questions about why ministers’ records, including the premier’s calendar, were excluded or whether the office would proactively release the calendar now that it is not subject to access requests. The questions were referred to the office of Stephen Crawford, the minister of public and business service delivery, whose press secretary, Giulia Paikin, said Ontario’s FOI and privacy laws were built for “a pre-digital era” and had not been updated for 40 years.
“That's why we are establishing a clear and modern FOI system while bringing Ontario in line with nearly every other province, and the Federal government, who have had similar legislation in place for decades,” Paikin said in the emailed statement.
The immediate effect is that a record that had offered periodic public insight into Ford’s appointments and meetings is now shielded from routine access requests. It remains unclear whether the premier’s office will provide any voluntary substitute for those disclosures.
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