Submission on Prince Edward Island’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act

2 July 2025.

The Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) is today publicly launching its Submission on Prince Edward Island’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The Submission was provided in response to a call for public input into the review by the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island (PEI) of this Canadian province’s right to information law. The submission assesses the law using CLD’s RTI Rating and assigns a middling score of 94 out of 150 possible points.

“One of the positive features of PEI’s right to information law is that it provides for reviews by a standing committee of the Legislative Assembly every six years,” said Toby Mendel, Executive Director of CLD. “We hope that this review will lead to meaningful reforms to the law, several aspects of which should be updated to reflect international standards and better practices.”

CLD’s submission provides several recommendations for improvement, including that:

• The scope of the law should be expanded to apply fully to all information held by the executive, legislative and judicial branches, as well as private bodies which perform a public function or receive significant public funding, to the extent of that funding, with no exclusions for any categories of information or any bodies.
• Consideration should be given to requiring requests to be processed as soon as possible and within 15 days, absent an extension or transfer, and to cap extensions at 30 days.
• The regime of exceptions should be revised to remove problematic exceptions and to subject all exceptions to a harm test.
• Care should be given to ensuring that the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office is adequately staffed and resourced, so as to be able to reduce its backlog and complete reviews in a timely manner.

CLD’s submission is available here, and the rating is available for download here.

For further information, please contact:

Raphael Vagliano
Legal Officer
Centre for Law and Democracy
Email: raphael@law-democracy.org
+1 514 506-0948
www.law-democracy.org
X: @law_democracy