Watchdogs Warn FOI Rights Break Where Small Bodies Lack Capacity

The transparency story B.C. should not miss is hiding in plain sight: access rights are only as real as the office that has to honour them.

On Nov. 2, Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial information regulators released a joint resolution calling on governments to better equip small public bodies to meet access-to-information obligations. The B.C. Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner says the resolution was adopted at the regulators’ annual meeting in Ottawa on Sept. 15.

The warning is not abstract. The regulators identify small public bodies such as municipalities, schools, police boards and other local institutions — the same kinds of places where citizens go looking for records on zoning decisions, environmental assessments, public-safety initiatives and bylaw enforcement. In other words: the records that show whether government power is being used fairly, competently and in public view.

The regulators say limited staffing, funding, expertise and technology can produce delays, inconsistent practices and barriers for requesters. That is a polite way of describing a hard accountability failure. A right that exists on paper but disappears at the counter is not a right the public can rely on.

This matters after years of NDP government because Victoria expanded programs, mandates and local implementation duties while repeatedly asking municipalities and other local bodies to carry more of the delivery burden. The regulators did not blame the B.C. NDP for the national capacity problem. But the test for B.C. lawmakers is obvious: if the province pushes power, targets, policing transitions, housing rules or environmental duties down into smaller institutions, it must also make sure the public can get the records back out.

The resolution’s proposed fixes are practical, not glamorous: resources, training, digital tools, modern records management, shared-service models, fee frameworks that do not create barriers, transparent-by-default program design and more proactive disclosure. Those are not bureaucratic extras. They are the plumbing of democratic accountability.

B.C. should treat this as a repair order. Every new provincial mandate that lands on a municipality, school district, police board or local agency should come with a public-records plan: who keeps the records, how they are searched, what gets disclosed proactively, what technology is funded, what timelines are tracked and what happens when capacity runs out.

The NDP era left British Columbians with bigger systems, thicker rulebooks and more decisions routed through local implementation. The next accountability standard should be simple: no public power without public records, and no access right that depends on whether a small office can afford to answer.