From the "Data Trail" Blog

In July 2011, the B.C. government announced a new policy when it comes to Freedom of Information requests.

Instead of just sending records to the person who requested them, it would also make those records available to the general public on its Open Information website 72 hours after sending them to the original requester.

But it appears the B.C. government’s “open government” policy isn’t quite as open as it first appeared.

Last September, I was on a panel discussion at the B.C. Information Summit with Gwen Barlee, a researcher and FOI whiz with the Wilderness Committee. Like many frequent FOI requesters, Barlee complained about the new policy, which she said didn’t give activists like her enough time to review requested records and pitch exclusive stories to journalists. But Barlee mentioned something else interesting: Some of the FOIs she’d filed never showed up on the government site.

Barlee said she wasn’t sure why — one possibility, she said, was that the records included copyrighted material, like photocopied newspaper articles.

I was curious what was up. So last month I filed an FOI request to the B.C. government asking for a copy of the criteria it uses to decide which requests not to publish on its website — and a copy, in spreadsheet format, of all the FOI requests not put online.

This week I got my response: A checklist for FOI coordinators to fill out when deciding whether records should be published online or not. Basically, the checklist lists the following types of records that should not go up on the site:

1. Personal information about a requester.
2. Information that could harm relations with First Nations.
3. Information that could harm relations with another government.
4. Information that could harm a third-party’s business interests.
5. Information that could threaten someone’s safety or cause property damage.

The first four are pretty straightforward. They basically apply to situations where an individual, First Nation, government or business is the one requesting the records. So they might get information back about themselves that would have been redacted if it had been requested by someone else. For example, I can file a request for a copy of my medical records — but I’d be pretty pissed off if the government posted them on their website for the whole world to see.

The fifth criteria is a bit more odd. Not releasing records that could harm someone’s safety seems perfectly reasonable. But that exemption is already in the Act in Section 19(1). In short, the government shouldn’t be releasing that type of information at all — even to the original requester. So why mention it here? The answer may be in the example the government provides of the type of record that could put someone’s safety at risk:

For example, any government employees’ and government officials’ Outlook calendar.

Indeed, it seems that preventing the release of government calendars is one of the primary results of this policy.

Of the 1,777 FOI requests not published on the government’s website, more than 40 per cent of them — 770 — were requests for government employees’ Outlook calendars.

One of the strange things about how the government handled my request for these records is that while they sent me a copy of its FOI publication policy in response to my FOI request, they actually decided to post the spreadsheet I requested on its Open Data website instead.

I don’t have a problem with that, but I can’t help but note the irony here: The government insisted on putting on its open data site a list of all the FOI requests it doesn’t want the public to see.

You can take a look at all the non-published FOI requests yourself on the Open Data site or over at Buzzdata, where I’ve also uploaded a copy. The spreadsheet indicates, for each request, key details like which ministry received the request, when the records were released and why they weren’t published online. It also includes a description of what the requester was asking for.

The spreadsheet doesn’t indicate what the records themselves contained, of course, but if you’re curious about any one of them you can file your own FOI request for them: just ask for a copy of all records released in response to the prior request, citing the request number.