Extract – Deprived of meaning | A perverted access to information law?

In this essay, journalist and author Marie-Ève ​​Martel details the importance of Quebec’s access to information system and highlights its often obsolete mechanisms.

The Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies and the protection of personal information is imperfect. It has not kept pace with information and communications technologies. Above all, the revisions to the law seem to have dealt only with the protection of personal information; very little has been done to facilitate and improve the publication of information of public interest. According to Claude Robillard, “the law on access to information is seriously ill. It is often used to retain information rather than disseminate it ”.¹

Already in 2001, the Professional Federation of Quebec Journalists (FPJQ) denounced the gradual disinterest in the face of access to information by the Access to Information Commission for the benefit of the protection of privacy:

The entire 1999-2000 annual report of the Commission is devoted to reporting on its efforts to ensure better protection of personal information. The advisory, advisory, investigative and monitoring functions devolved on the CAI are fully mobilized by the protection of personal information.²

According to the Federation, the Commission should also draw up a complete and detailed inventory of access to information.

Even the current president of the CAI, Mr.^e Diane Poitras, confided to me that “there was a time when we spoke too little about the protection of personal information; now, it is access to information that we do not talk about enough ”.³

Obviously, we must reiterate the importance of protecting the personal information of individuals in order to prevent them from suffering any harm. But is it really any less serious to withhold information than to divulge too much?

On the one hand, the law provides that an organization or an agent of its application who refuses, without valid reason, access to public information is liable to a fine ranging from $ 100 to $ 500, an amount which may be doubled in the event of a repeat offense. On the other hand, disclosing information protected by law can result in a fine of $ 200 to $ 1,000 and from $ 500 to $ 2,500 in the event of a repeat offense. The difference in the fines imposed shows a greater concern for the protection of personal information than for the disclosure of information of public interest. In either case, it was confirmed, no fines have ever been imposed to date.⁴

According to the FPJQ, the original intentions that led to the establishment of the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies and the protection of personal information “Have been perverted”^⁠5 and are now far removed from the “great idealism” of its creators. The latter were even “convinced that the law would be so effective that a day would come when it would have to be abolished (hence the idea of ​​the review clause). [quinquennale]), since the objective of almost total transparency would be achieved ”.⁶ In 2014, before the Commission of Inquiry on the Construction Industry, responsible for shedding light on the corruption and collusion that have taken place for several years, the FPJQ argued that the law “bears the brunt of its 32 years old “. The objective of making information accessible within a transparent State was finally abandoned in favor of a “culture of secrecy which has grown since 2003, with the centralization of government communications policies”.⁷

Disclosure of information has become completely arbitrary, not least because the law currently leaves far too wide a latitude to those responsible for administering it in public organizations, lamented the non-profit organization representing some 1,500 professional journalists. of the province. “If relations are good with the clerk or the general directorate of services, access is greatly facilitated … which is not a valid principle of good municipal governance”, she said ten years ago. years.^⁠8

This is also an observation made by the Professional Association of Engineers of the Government of Quebec more than 20 years ago:

It is not so much what we add to the law that causes the problem but what we refrain from taking away from it, that is to say the almost unlimited possibility offered to the person in charge of access to information within public bodies to refuse sensitive information on the basis of exceptions as numerous as they are ill-defined.^⁠9

One question remains: should we conclude that the law has failed? To mark its 25th anniversary, the chairman of the commission that gave birth to it, Jean Paré, recalled that from the start, the transparency of the State bothered certain mandarins who, rather than submit to the spirit of the new law, tried from its first breath to circumvent it:

I have learned from conscientious officials that even before the adoption and entry into force of the Access law, some ministries and some companies and public institutions have systematically reclassified and redefined masses of documents to exempt them from the application of the law.^⁠10

As the law is still in force, 40 years after its creation, and that during this period, it allowed the disclosure of documents and public information, one cannot say that it was a sword in the water. , quite the contrary. However, the preceding example alone demonstrates that, from the outset, its application was vitiated by the desire of some people not to allow such open access as the spirit of the law envisioned. The years that have passed have only shed more light on the pitfalls of the legislative text and the ease of circumventing its prerogatives.

1. Robillard, Claude (2016), Freedom of the press, freedom of all, Montreal, Quebec America.

2. Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec (2001), Memoir on the Access to Information Act, tabled as part of Bill 122 amending the Law on Access to Public Documents.

3. Telephone interview, April 23, 2021.

4. Ibid.

5. Professional Federation of Quebec Journalists (2014), “Freeing public information: an imperative to fight corruption and collusion”, brief submitted within the framework of the Commission of Inquiry into the Construction Industry.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec (2010b), “New rules for a better circulation of municipal information in Quebec”.

9. Professional Association of Engineers of the Government of Quebec (2000), “Access to public documents: limiting exceptions, a democratic necessity”, brief presented to the Committee on Culture.

10. Paré, Jean (2006), “How was born the law of access to information”, The thirty, flight. 30, no 4, p. 20-21.

Deprived of meaning
Advocacy for better access to information

Marie-Eve Martel

Overall editions, October 2021

176 pages