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Canada Open Letter: Time for a Serious Review of the Access to Information Act
- By Raphael CLD
- 09 June 2025
Canada: Time for a Serious Review of the Access to Information Act
Over the last 20 plus years, different official actors in Canada have conducted repeated reviews of the federal Access to Information Act (ATIA), despite which reform of the Act remains a pressing need. In June 2025, the Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD), with the support of 18 organisations and individuals, sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney calling on him to ensure that the upcoming review, due to start that month, would be “genuine and timely” and takes place “under the guidance of an independent panel with a broad mandate to consider all reform needs”.
Every independent observer recognises that the ATIA is not fit for purpose. It earns only 93 points out of a possible total of 150 on CLD’s respected RTI Rating, sits in a dismal 53rd position globally out of the 140 countries with right to information laws and fails to deliver on its main promise, i.e. government transparency. Despite that, the 2022 report to Parliament on the last review of the ATIA, conducted by Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS), did not recommend changes to the Act but instead focused on improving practice. That was a repudiation of the input of independent observers and an insult to the experience of users of the Act.
The Act mandates reviews every five years, which means that another review should be launched later this month. As a duty holder under the Act, it is a conflict of interest for TBS to conduct the review, and this conflict is reflected in the inadequate conclusions of the last review. For us, the “objective review” which Prime Minister Carney called for means a review by an independent panel with a broad mandate and adequate resources to hold proper consultations before reaching its conclusions. Our letter includes a draft Terms of Reference for such a review and calls on the Prime Minister to conduct the upcoming review in line with those Terms of Reference.
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