Ken Rubin
Ken Rubin is an Ottawa-based investigative researcher and is reachable at kenrubin.ca.
Ken Rubin is an Ottawa-based investigative researcher and is reachable at kenrubin.ca.
It would in effect turn the Privacy Act into a data integration act where citizens have less say over use of their personal information.
The Ontario government’s proposed changes tear apart the foundation of the 1988 Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, but, federally, we may not be too far behind.
The Treasury Board wants to ignore the basic faults with current access, and award itself by cutting away more records and having fewer orders and users.
The AI tools are designed to be used defensively to uphold secrecy positions, and to possibly contain the federal information commissioner’s efforts at ordering more timely releases.
Banning NDAs or releasing those with such agreements does not appear to be in the cards, but victims want relief.
The pressure for lawful warrantless access to surveil internet subscriber data is long-standing and began in the late 1990s. But recently acquired access-to-information documents shed some light on some of the actors driving the push for more lawful access.
In a world of co-pilots and chat bots, this public interest researcher feels the growing impacts of artificial intelligence.
The federal environment assessment tool was always limited, with powerful enemies fighting back well before the Carney government wanted to curtail its usage.
With Treasury Board once again handling the first stage of the ATI review, you can be sure of more delays, more exemptions proposed, and more people being excluded from using access to information.
We have a very tenuous and shaky situation with increasing setbacks in disclosures, and more creative avoidance, delays, and denials.
The public needs to know about incidents involving the fraudulent use of social benefits, and about how fraudsters forcefully exploit and draw others into their operations.
Internal documents give the impression Canada would gladly abandon its current support for a seabed-mining moratorium if some standards were in place.
The feds’ new national money laundering enforcement agency may not be able to confront the illegal wildlife trafficking in Canada.
Mark Carney may be looking for openings to the rigid firewalls and the access-to-information protective system his predecessors abided by—or he may just follow in their footsteps.
Revealing little is the new norm, bringing with it the same old mismanagement problems.
We need a better deal that actively puts transparency back more fully into the picture, and we can start by changing the decades-old, decrepit Access to Information Act.