Submission to Review of New Brunswick Right to Information Act

22 September 2025.

The Canadian province of New Brunswick is undertaking a review of its right to information law and, as part of this process, the Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) has prepared a Submission on New Brunswick’s Right to Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The Act earns just 75 out of a possible 150 points, or 50%, on CLD’s RTI Rating, placing it among the weakest Canadian jurisdictions and, were it a country, in 89^th place out of the 140 countries which are currently assessed on the RTI Rating. The Act does particularly poorly in terms of promotional measures, scope and exceptions, and the CLD Submission provides numerous recommendations to address these weaknesses.

“New Brunswick is currently languishing at the bottom of Canadian jurisdictions in terms of both its legal framework for RTI and performance in implementing its law,” said Toby Mendel, Executive Director of CLD. “This review presents a real opportunity for New Brunswick to change that by adopting a robust RTI law and then moving on to address the culture of secrecy in the province.”

Some of the key recommendations in the Submission are as follows:

• The scope of the Act should be expanded to cover all three branches of government, all bodies which are owned or controlled by those branches, and private bodies which perform public functions or operate with significant public funding.
• The time limits for responding to requests should be shortened and the rule on not charging fees, currently set out in a regulation, should be incorporated into the primary legislation.
• The regime of exceptions should be overhauled to limit exceptions to those which are internationally recognised as legitimate, to subject all exceptions to a harm test and public interest override, and to impose sunset clauses on all exceptions protecting public interests.
• The oversight body should be able to issue binding decisions and to review all information, regardless of claims of secrecy.
• All public bodies should be required to report annually on their implementation of the Act.

The Submission is available here.

For further information, please contact:

Toby Mendel
Executive Director, Centre for Law and Democracy
toby@law-democracy.org
+1 902 431-3686
www.law-democracy.org
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