Calling for accountability

Access to information auditor says P.E.I. should include municipalities in its freedom of information legislation

P.E.I.’s municipalities should be brought under the provincial freedom of information law, says the leader on a recent access to information audit for News Media Canada.

Fred Vallance-Jones, who was one of the authors of a report on the audit that included requests to Charlottetown, said it’s time for P.E.I. to include municipalities in its Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection Act.

“There is no reason municipal governments shouldn’t be accountable to the public the same way as other governments and frankly I scratch my head as to why P.E.I. has not joined every other province,” he said.

The audit gave Charlottetown an A grade with five of six requests released in full and one response of no records. Those requests took an average of 2.7 days to be processed, the report said.

But because Charlottetown, like all other municipalities in the province, does not fall under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection Act, it isn’t required by law to respond to any requests.

P.E.I. is the only province that doesn’t include municipalities in its access to information legislation.

Vallance-Jones said the auditors think the city knows the requests were coming from them, and it doesn’t reflect the reality of a normal government response to freedom of information requests.

“I think you have to take the City of Charlottetown’s fine performance with a large grain of salt,” he said.

The city also could have refused to disclose anything and responded that it wasn’t subject to the FOIPP Act, but didn’t, Vallance-Jones said. Municipalities have argued including them in the FOIPP Act would be costly. Vallance-Jones doesn’t buy that argument and said freedom of information legislation in other provinces includes municipalities that would be as small as some in P.E.I. “I think that argument doesn’t hold water,” he said. The audit looked at responses to requests from municipalities across the country, all of the territorial and provincial governments and the federal government.

It gave the federal government an F, in part because of the length of time it took to get responses.

The P.E.I. government got an A with an average of 12.3 days for its completed requests to be processed.

Of the 15 requests sent, 11 were released in full, two were denied in part, one came with a $540 fee estimate and one generated a response of no records.

“Overall, pretty good,” Vallance-Jones said.