Unlocking Secret Canada
About me
Tom Cardoso, investigative reporter
at The Globe and Mail
Canada’s FOI regimes are broken. Our FOI experiences told us this, as did our preliminary conversations with sources.
So, a few years ago, we set out to do something about this.
Enter: Secret Canada
Secret Canada is the culmination of 18 months of investigative work. More than 800 FOIs and 200+ interviews.
Our reporting revealed that public institutions skirt FOI laws by overusing redactions, failing to meet legislated timelines and claiming “no records” exist when they do. And these institutions face few – if any – consequences for ignoring the precedents set by courts and information commissioners.
We began publishing smaller stories last year, leading up to the bigger pieces that we began publishing over the summer.
Our main stories have looked at:
Our reporting has begun to have an impact.
The province of Alberta has refused to process any of the FOIs we filed for this project – in doing so, we believe they’re breaking the law. They are now under investigation.
Information commissioners have also begun to band together, calling for modern FOI legislation.
As for secretcanada.com…
It’s:
- A database of more than 300,000 completed FOI summaries for 600+ federal, provincial, territorial and municipal public bodies
- Educational material, including detailed guides on filing FOIs, navigating the system and appealing decisions
- A blog
Our database was constructed from hundreds of FOIs, filed to every major public body in the country. Ministries, municipalities, police, hospitals, universities, Crown corporations… the list goes on.
The website has also had an impact.
We’ve heard from many teachers, academics, journalists, activists, etc. who have now used our database and guides to file their very first FOIs.