Ottawa's hard-won culture of government accountability is under threat — and the irony couldn't be sharper.
The Ford government is moving to roll back Ontario's Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation in ways that critics are calling deeply regressive. For a city that has seen firsthand just how powerful FOI requests can be, the proposed changes should set off alarm bells across the capital.
The LRT Lesson Ottawa Already Learned
It was Freedom of Information requests that helped expose the full extent of Ottawa's LRT disaster — the delays, the derailments, the internal communications that showed city officials and contractors knew more than they were letting on. Those documents, pried loose through the FOI process, were instrumental in building the public case for a full inquiry.
In a twist that would be almost funny if it weren't so serious, Premier Doug Ford himself called that rare public inquiry into Ottawa's LRT failings — an inquiry made possible, in large part, because journalists, advocates, and citizens used FOI laws to dig up the truth. Now his government wants to make that kind of digging significantly harder.
What the Changes Mean
Longtime access-to-information researcher Ken Rubin, who has spent decades filing FOI requests and fighting for government transparency, says the proposed reforms would make it easier for government bodies to delay, redact, or outright reject information requests. Fee structures could be overhauled in ways that price out ordinary citizens. Timelines could be extended. The overall effect, Rubin argues, would be to insulate governments from scrutiny at precisely the moment when public trust in institutions is already fragile.
For Ottawa, this matters in very practical ways. The city is still rebuilding confidence after the LRT fiasco. Residents are watching ongoing debates about city spending, transit expansion, development approvals, and policing. The ability to request government records isn't an abstract legal nicety — it's the mechanism that lets taxpayers verify what they're being told.
Accountability Doesn't Happen Without Information
FOI requests have driven some of the most important local journalism Ottawa has seen in recent years — not just on the LRT, but on everything from police oversight to zoning decisions to pandemic spending. Advocacy groups, community organizations, and individual residents use them too, often to understand decisions that affect their neighbourhoods directly.
Weakening those tools doesn't just hurt journalists. It hurts anyone who has ever wondered why a development got approved, why a city contract went to a particular company, or why a public service changed without explanation.
The Bigger Picture
Ontario has long lagged behind other provinces and the federal government on access-to-information reform. Advocates have been pushing for modernization that makes the system faster and more accessible — not slower and more opaque. The Ford government's proposed direction moves decidedly the wrong way.
With a provincial election on the horizon and Ottawa's local political landscape already in flux, now is exactly the wrong time to be pulling back on transparency. If the changes go through as feared, Ottawans could find themselves with far less ability to know what their governments are doing — and far fewer tools to push back when things go wrong.
The LRT inquiry showed what accountability can look like when the information flows. These FOI changes would make sure it doesn't happen again.
Source: Ottawa Citizen / Ken Rubin opinion
