by Richard J. Brennan

Monday, May 9, 2011

Mercury News Services

The Liberals at Queen’s Park are being accused once again by opposition critics of hiding information from the public.

Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s office is under fire for manipulating the Freedom of Information system to delay making “contentious” documents public.

The New Democrats produced evidence showing Duncan’s then legislative secretary Andrew Chornenky in 2009 was flagging opposition requests for information and then identifying them as “contentious,” which critics contend is code for putting the brakes on.

And when bureaucrats argued in one case that it was a routine request and not contentious, he insisted “please make it one.”

“It is pretty clear that you have political staff interfering with getting information out that the public has a right to access,” NDP Finance Critic MPP Peter Tabuns said.

“The politicizing of Freedom Information is a real problem,” he said.

Duncan suggested to reporters it was no big deal and wasn’t being used to delay information. “So you type contentious on a note, who cares?” he said after the matter was raised in the Legislature.

Freedom of Information Commissioner Ann Cavoukian in her 2000 report wasn’t quite so dismissive about the practice of identifying requests as being from the opposition and being flagged as “contentious.”

“A basic premise underlying the operation of all freedom of information scheme is that the identity of a requester should only be disclosed within an institution on a “need to know” basis,” she said in her report.

Cavoukian made it clear even then, when Progressive Conservative Premier Mike Harris was in power, she was concerned the “contentious” label was being overused and unnecessarily holding up requests for politically sensitive information.

The FOI controversy is another in a series involving the government and or Premier Dalton McGuinty with respect to keeping information from the public, including giving civil servants a secret salary increase and putting McGuinty’s expenses under the name of an employee in the Premier’s Office.

Senior officials in the Liberals later in the day defended the party’s record on releasing information, noting that in more than 85 per cent of the cases the government has met the 30-day compliance period.

Also they pointed out the practice of labelling politically sensitive issues as contentious started under then NDP Premier Bob Rae’s government in 1990.

Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak told reporters the public needs to be assured the freedom of information request system is not being “politically gerrymandered” by the government.

“We are very concerned about the Liberals playing politics and trying to hide things from the general public,” he said.

Mercury news services