The NDP is trying to block the B.C. Liberals from obtaining information about government emails, claiming the civil service is being overloaded by opposition requests for records.
Government lawyers have asked B.C.’s independent information and privacy commissioner for the power to selectively ignore requests from the Liberals for public records related to 30 private email addresses of provincial officials, MLAs and cabinet ministers.
The Liberals want to know if any politicians or staff used personal Gmail accounts to conduct government business, which would violate the law.
The minister responsible for freedom of informaton, Jinny Sims, had to apologize in May for using personal email to do government work. Premier John Horgan also apologized and launched a review after seven of his staff were caught improperly mass-deleting their emails over several months.
“It’s incumbent on the Opposition to demand answers on behalf of the public,” said Liberal MLA Jas Johal. “Stifling the opposition’s FOI request essentially says minister Sims and the NDP government aren’t answerable to the public.”
Politically, the NDP distanced itself Tuesday from the appearance of using taxpayer-paid lawyers to prevent the official Opposition from obtaining public records, saying the legal challenge was launched by civil servants without the knowledge of Sims.
Deputy minister Jill Kot said in a statement it was her call to involve lawyers because the Liberals filed 1,750 FOI requests in the first three months of 2018, accounting for three-quarters of all general requests received by the government and marking a 429 per cent increase from the same period a year earlier.
“The estimated cost of processing these requests is $4.7 million,” said Kot. “This significant increase in requests has understandably had operational impacts on the system’s ability to provide timely FOI service to British Columbians.”
In its letter to the privacy commissioner, the government wrote that the spike in requests by the Liberals amounted to an abuse of the law.
However, the NDP in government has changed the rules on who retains records, sparking confusion over whether cabinet ministers have to retain any emails at all. The Liberals argue more than 800 of their requests are simply asking 23 government ministries for the same Gmail records because it’s unclear who retains them. Kot said it would cost $2 million just to process the Gmail FOI requests.
“With respect, the requests at issue here … are entirely consistent with the objectives of the act; they are fundamental to the role of an official Opposition in a parliamentary democracy, which is to hold government to account,” wrote Spencer Sproule, chief of staff to Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson.
The government’s legal challenge is troubling, said Mike Larsen, president of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.
“I can understand why (government) would say this is impeding their capacity to do our job,” said Larsen, citing the unusually high number of requests.
“On the other hand, the kind of information that’s being sought here is information that clearly seems to be in the public interest. It comes out of acknowledged wrongdoing and errors on behalf of the government. It’s not like it’s a shotgun fishing expedition on everything. There is some basis for it.”
The section of FOI law cited, Section 43, is meant to ban people who hinder the system with a flood of vexatious and frivolous requests. The privacy commissioner has allowed its use fewer than 20 times in the past 22 years. It will be hard for government to argue such a case here, said Larsen.
“The public right to know is really important,” he said. “I’ve never seen, in recent memory, a Section 43 case involving the official Opposition.”
The Liberal have hired an outside contractor, Jason Plotz, to file all their records requests, triage the responses and turn them over to Liberal research staff. Plotz was an aide to former prime minister Stephen Harper, credited for being his best researcher, and now runs a private consulting business.
