Canada: Submission on Access to Information

16 June 2026.

The Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) has made a submission to the Canadian federal government’s consultation on its regular five-yearly review of the Access to Information Act (ATIA). Our comments are largely focused on law reform needs, given that the ATIA only earns 95 out of a possible 150 points on the RTI Rating (63%), putting it in an unimpressive 47^th place from among the 142 countries globally with right to information laws.

“One of our key messages is that the review should have been conducted by an independent panel of experts rather than a government department which is subject to the ATIA” said Toby Mendel, Executive Director of CLD. “The conflict of interest that this represents is quite clearly reflected in the government’s reform proposals, many of which seek to extend the time limits for responding to requests and expand exceptions, the opposite of what is needed.”

The CLD submission applauds a number of the government proposals, such as for measures to render the binding decisions of the Information Commissioner enforceable and for imposing a “duty to document” on public authorities. But we also have a number of criticisms, including the following:

• Three of the four proposals regarding time limits seek to extend them, mostly unjustifiably, while there is no serious proposal to address the very major problem of delays under the Act.
• There are a number of proposals to add new, non-harm-tested exceptions, while otherwise positive proposals on a public interest override and sunset clauses are far too limited.
• A wholly unwarranted proposal seeks to limit the scope of the ATIA to “official records” – those which, according to the officials who oversee records, contribute to “transparency and accountability” – and to records which are held in “official repositories”, despite ongoing problems with officials doing government business on private devices.

But the biggest single problem with the government proposals is that they simply fail to address a number of serious shortcomings with the ATIA, including the limited scope of the Act, its overbroad regime of exceptions and the ineffective system of sanctions. The proposals include a number of interesting ideas to support access to information by Indigenous peoples, but these are not sufficiently developed to enable CLD to assess them properly.

The submission is available here and the government proposals are available here.

For further information, please contact:

Toby Mendel
Executive Director
Centre for Law and Democracy
Email: toby@law-democracy.org
+1 902 431-3686
www.law-democracy.org
X: @law_democracy
BlueSky: @law-democracy.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/centre-for-law-and-democracy