On April 23, Ontario lawmakers passed Bill 97, Plan to Protect Ontario Act (Budget Measures), 2026, which received royal assent the next day. The bill sailed through the legislature without committee hearings and passed in a 57 to 33 vote, with Opposition MPPs chanting “FOI” as the vote took place.
That chant was in reference to a section of the bill that excludes the records of the premier, cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants and their offices under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA).
NDP Opposition Leader Marit Stiles said on the social media site X that “honest governments don’t change the law to protect them from the truth.”
“Democracy dies in darkness. Doug Ford just passed a law to hide his phone records and 40 years of public records,” she said. “As premier, I will roll back these changes and restore transparency, trust and faith in our democracy.”
And Stiles’s concerns about the changes were echoed by observers outside the elective politics.
The office of Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC) Patricia Kosseim said in an email that it was “disappointed” the government took the step it did.
“Without opportunity for committee debate, many interested parties, including our office, has been deprived of participating in the democratic process,” the commissioner’s office said.
The changes being made to FIPPA are highly significant and generational, the IPC said.
“Ontario will not be the same again,” the commissioner’s office said. “At a time when democratic accountability matters more than ever, Ontario should be strengthening the public’s access and privacy rights, not diminishing them.”
Duff Conacher, co-founder of advocacy group Democracy Watch, said the changes that the Ford government “rammed through” the legislature are “dangerously undemocratic.”
“It will make cabinet ministers’ decisions and actions much more secretive, and that will lead to even more corruption, waste of the public’s money and other abuses of power,” he said. “Premier Ford and his cabinet ministers have made several false claims about the measures, including that the federal government and other provincial governments have similar measures in their laws — but in fact Ford’s changes impose the most excessive secrecy on cabinet records of any government in Canada.”
Conacher noted Bill 97 includes a measure that makes cabinet secrecy changes apply retroactively back to 1988, saying the law will have the effect of overriding binding rulings by the OIPC and the Ontario Divisional Court that ordered Ford to disclose his cellphone records.
“Democracy Watch is considering filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the measures,” he said.
James Turk, Toronto Metropolitan University
“It’s going to be very much more difficult for the public to know what this government is doing,” he said. “Democracy is based on the notion that the public has a right to know what their governments are doing on their behalf — and this is taking away records of the offices of the most senior politicians, the ones who are most responsible for what happens, and saying you can’t have access to them.”
Turk made a link between the changes — as have other observers — to the legal wrangling over access to Ford’s personal phone records after an access request was launched by a doctor who said he lost his position at a Toronto-area hospital due to his criticism of the Ontario government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That was allegedly a major factor in the premier’s zeal to get this passed,” he said. “These changes will mean that, because all these records are excluded, including any government business that was done on personal emails or personal phone calls, there’s no longer any statutory requirement to protect those records.”
Anaïs Bussières McNicoll, director of the fundamental freedoms program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), called Bill 97 a significant blow to government transparency in Ontario, undermining a crucial tool used by journalists, researchers and oversight organizations to hold government officials accountable.
“The law’s retroactive application is particularly concerning, because it allows the government to avoid disclosure of records that have already been requested,” she said.
Giulia Paikin, spokesperson for Minister of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement Stephen Crawford, said in an email that Ontario’s privacy framework has gone nearly 40 years without any major updates and no longer reflects today’s technology, creating privacy risks for both our government and the public.
“That’s why we are taking action to protect confidential information, sensitive data and strengthen cyber safeguards on children’s information,” she said. “These changes align Ontario’s technology practices with the approach taken in nearly every other Canadian jurisdiction while modernizing our digital framework and enhancing cybersecurity for families.”
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