De Jong loosens up information flow

Finance Minister Mike de Jong has issued direct orders to a number of ministries to proactively disclose details of government operations in a bid to bring B.C.’s information management up to standard.

In the quarter-century history of freedom-of-information law, it’s the first time a minister has issued directives under the act. De Jong signed five orders that cover his cabinet colleagues’ travel expenses and daily calendars, along with gambling grants given to community groups, all directly awarded contracts and the ongoing status of all FOI requests.

Those and other changes come after sustained controversy about information management, including a blast from the independent commissioner about lax practices when it comes to retaining documents in the offices of the premier and cabinet ministers.

De Jong told reporters Monday he wants to get B.C.’s information management to the same standard as its financial management, and has allocated $3 million more to records management, bringing that budget to $15.3 million a year.

Information and privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham’s Access Denied report last year revealed the triple-delete scandal, where a minister’s aide expunged from the office computer some emails relevant to an FOI request. A new process designates civil servants, not political staff, to respond to requests made to cabinet offices. Ministers, political staff and others have been trained in records management.

There’s also a new policy where the minister’s office is presumed to have signed off on requests after a set time, in order to eliminate stalling. De Jong said the process will eliminate the level of oversight on FOIs at the political level.

Some time this month, all FOI requests will be posted online, with tracking information showing how much time has elapsed. It’s aimed at increasing accountability. The government gets 8,000 to 10,000 requests a year, far more per capita than anywhere else in Canada.

The Information Management Act, passed last year, takes effect today and designates a chief records officer to work on bring in records management into the digital age. It replaces an act from 1936.

Some of the information that will now be posted regularly could be considered sensitive. The calendars of ministers and deputy ministers will be made available, as will all ministers’ travel receipts on a quarterly basis, starting this summer. “They’re fine with it,” de Jong said of his colleagues.

MLAs’ expenses have been routinely posted publicly for the past three years, and de Jong said there hasn’t been much in the way of scandal.

A sample travel disclosure made available at his news conference showed de Jong billed $1,271 for a pre-Christmas trip to Ottawa, spent $197 at a hotel and paid $56 in parking fees. The hotel was not disclosed for security concerns. Similar restrictions will apply to a number of details in the calendars that will be made available. All the other grounds for redacting specifics from the calendars will also continue to apply.

Contracts that are directly awarded, as opposed to won by public tender, are now available by searches, but will be made more accessible.

The grants routinely handed out from gambling revenue are usually announced, but the new system will see them all made accessible on one website.

A legislature committee has been reviewing FOI law for the past several months and is due to make recommendations this month. They could result in further upgrades to the law, including incorporating a “duty to document” into the law. That could curb the established practice of avoiding putting certain issues or decisions in writing.

De Jong also said the charging of fees for compiled responses to complicated FOI requests is up for debate. The government collects only about $50,000 a year in such fees.

He said the test of the new approach, where information is routinely released unasked for, will come when someone files an FOI request for data that has been already released proactively.

“They better look the same,” he said.

Access Denied was one of numerous reports from the Information and Privacy Commission that chided the government for lax record-keeping and indifference to FOI response times.