In the year 2026, it shouldn’t be controversial to say that the public has a right to know what its government is doing in its name, with its money. In Ontario, however, this remains a contested idea. Premier Doug Ford’s government will, when MPPs return to the legislature next week, introduce legislation substantially reducing the ability of the public to access government documents, excluding cabinet members and parliamentary assistants from the province’s Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection Act. The government intends to make the changes retroactive, which will kill numerous ongoing requests for documents — most prominently, the case of the premier’s own phone records, which an Ontario court has said he needs to turn over.
Nice work, if you can get it: the premier has used his private phone for public business, thwarting the clear purpose of Ontario’s transparency and accountability laws for years, and with the consequences finally catching up to him, he’s going to have the PC majority in the legislature change the rules to declare that he’s done nothing wrong.
The government says it’s merely “aligning” Ontario’s legislation with other provinces, a claim that offends logic in at least three ways. The first is simply the “what would your mom say” test, for anyone who ever tried to justify their misbehaviour because all their friends were doing it. If Danielle Smith and Francois Legault were jumping off a bridge, would Doug Ford do it too? That most of Canada’s provinces are engaged in a conspiracy to obscure their work from citizens doesn’t make it reasonable or good; if anything, it’s an aggravating factor in a crime against the public’s right to know.
Further, if there’s any value to Canada’s federal system, it’s precisely that the solution that works for Prince Edward Island or Saskatchewan doesn’t need to work for Ontario, and we should view with skepticism any claims that we need uniformity unless they’re grounded in clear evidence that we’ll get better outcomes. If Alberta or Nova Scotia has policies to better run hospitals or schools or highways, we should be open-minded and judge them based on actual facts. There’s no virtue to Ontario aping the systems of other orders of government “just because.”
Finally, there’s a compelling argument that the internal work of Ontario’s government should be held to a higher standard even if we think it’s okay that smaller provinces keep their voters more thoroughly in the dark: Ontario is (sorry, everyone else) bigger and more important. With 14 million of the country’s 37 million people, and nearly 40 per cent of its GDP, even in cases where Ontario’s government sticks purely to areas of provincial jurisdiction it can have national effects. If you want a clear case of this: the recent cramdown on national immigration is largely a reaction to the effects of Ontario’s post-secondary education policies: universities and colleges in this province tried to offset lost tuition revenue by cashing in on foreign students, causing an unplanned and uncontrolled surge in immigration even as the province simultaneously presided over a crisis of collapsing new homebuilding. Those are all areas of provincial jurisdiction, but they had national impacts. That kind of power demands scrutiny, and indeed a greater degree of scrutiny than we’d necessarily demand of smaller provinces where the effects of their decisions simply won’t be felt further afield.
And even if none of that were true, even if it was obviously and unambiguously better to adopt the rules of other provinces as our own, it still wouldn’t explain or justify making the changes retroactive to nullify the lawful demands Ontarians had already made.
There’s no general principle here that Ontario should follow the lead of other provinces. To pick another nationally-salient example, Ontario is nearly alone in Canada in its reliance on development charges on new homes to finance infrastructure. Most other provinces simply do not tax new homes to the same degree that Ontario does (only British Columbia is comparable) but the Ford government hasn’t “aligned” us with other jurisdictions on that file. Ontario’s failure on this file has forced the federal government to try and bribe local communities to lower those charges, with only mixed success.
To put it another way, the “principle” here only matters when it reinforces the power of the already-powerful, and is suddenly absent when it would actually force the government to make hard choices. There’s a word to describe when rules and principles don’t actually bind powerful people but force all of us to deal with the consequences: impunity. It’s a problem, frankly, throughout democratic politics in the 21st century, whether it’s former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s serial breaches of federal ethics laws, Doug Ford’s accountability backsliding, or any number of examples both lower and higher on the political food chain — any half-interested observer would be forgiven for believing that the system is rotting, and rotten.
But impunity doesn’t (always) last forever. Just as Ford and his PC majority are using legislative power to protect themselves with a legal shield, a future government of a different party could decide to use the legislature as a sword. The easiest political lay-up for an opposition party right now is to promise that they’ll use the legislature’s inherent powers to command the production of papers to publish all the Ford government’s emails. If that happens, Ford will have nowhere to turn and no one to blame but himself.