Supreme Court rules Ford government doesn’t have to disclose mandate letters

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday that Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government can keep his marching orders to cabinet ministers confidential.

The CBC had asked, under the province’s freedom-of-information law, for the letters written to ministers after Ford won the 2018 election but the request was denied on the basis that releasing the documents would reveal the substance of cabinet deliberations.

The Information and Privacy Commissioner disagreed, ordering the government to disclose them, and two levels of Ontario courts also sided with the CBC.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the letters are exempt from public disclosure.

While the outcome was unanimous, one of the justices on the panel of seven who heard the case came to the same conclusion as the majority, but for different reasons.

“Freedom of information (FOI) legislation strikes a balance between the public’s need to know and the confidentiality the executive requires to govern effectively,” Justice Andromache Karakatsanis wrote for the majority.

“Both are crucial to the proper functioning of our democracy.”

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Political analyst Keith Leslie said he believes it is a reasonable argument from the privacy commissioner that this is the end of deliberations and their just instructions to the ministers.

Leslie says they remember when Kathleen Win announced she was going to make her letters public and she did it, even though they were political form letters sent out to ministers saying ‘do good, do good for the people of Ontario and provide good service’.

Ford’s government had contended that cabinet confidentiality, candour and solidarity are fundamental to a system where responsible ministers collectively decide government policy, but the CBC argued disclosure is key to an informed public and accountable government.

While there is no doubt that public access to government-held information is vital to the democratic process, Karakatsanis wrote, in this case the information and privacy commissioner interpreted the freedom-of-information exemption around cabinet deliberations too narrowly.

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“In our constitutional democracy, the confidentiality of Cabinet deliberations is a precondition to responsible government because it enables collective ministerial responsibility,” Karakatsanis wrote.

“At base, Cabinet confidentiality promotes executive accountability by permitting private disagreement and candour in ministerial deliberations, despite public solidarity.”

The legal battle comes as the Ford Government continues to face blowback over the Greenbelt reversal, healthcare reform and the recent Service Ontario-Staples controversy.

While the PC party gathers to talp policy this weekend in Niagara Falls, opposition expressed Disappointment and believe the matter shouldn’t have made it to court.

Walton said it is not a surprise the courts backed the government “a government who spend how much of the public money, just to keep them all away, they could’ve done the right thing” she says “just publish them.”

The letters themselves were made public in September after a source provided them to Global News.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 2, 2024.