OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – Canadians looking to obtain public records via Access to Information requests from federal government departments are now mandated by law to show identification proving they are a citizen or a permanent resident.
Delays in obtaining an Access to Information request are already commonplace. As it stands now, Canadians looking to obtain records via Access to Information requests from federal government departments could be waiting years now for information due to the new rules.
On July 5, Treasury Board president Mona Fortier officially enacted the new identification rules, which were never offered for a public consultation.
According to the Treasury Board in a Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement, “No consultations were deemed to be necessary.”
The Treasury Board says that the new rules “need to ensure an individual making a request under the Act has the right to do so.”
“This includes ensuring the requester is a Canadian citizen, a permanent resident or a person present in Canada.”
Late last year, Fortier announced that new rules mandating that citizens provide a piece of identification in the form of a birth certificate or other means when submitting their information requests were coming.
Before the new rules took effect, one only had to attest to their Canadian citizenship when asking for an Access to Information request.
As it stands now, all federal departments and agencies will oversee deciding what qualifies as “adequate identification” when a Canadian asks for a request for public records.
“The government institution must request additional information from the person in order to confirm their right of access,” the Treasury Board said in a legal notice.
Last July, the Treasury Board had mentioned in a directive to its public service executives “to confirm the requester is a Canadian citizen.”
The new access to information identification requirements come about only a few months after news broke that many federal government agencies had been paying people to censor the contents of some Access to Information requests.
In January, LifeSiteNews reported how in the last two years alone multiple Canadian federal governmental departments spent $39 million hiring contractors to comb through and censor documents requested by the public under the Access to Information Act.
In December 2022, witnesses testifying at a House of Commons Access to Information committee meeting laid bare just how bad wait times are.
Conservative MP Michael Barrett asked retired Canadian Press reporter Dean Beeby what his longest wait time on an Access to Information request is.
“It would be in the order of 10 years,” Beeby replied at the time, adding that wait times are “terrible and getting worse” as the government and its departments “realize they face much bigger blowback from releasing information than from withholding.”
The slow speed at which these requests are satisfied became even more noticeable during COVID when independent journalists and constitutional lawyers began to submit more requests related to controversial public health policies such as vaccine mandates and lockdowns.
While some provincial information requests came through, most federal requests have not.
The independent news site Rebel News, for example, has noted that many of its information requests related to COVID have been delayed.