Many of these dealt with exemptions from access, recommending the addition of a discretionary injury test in most cases, which would evaluate "the harm to the interest (e.g., the conduct of international affairs) that could reasonably be expected to result from disclosure".
The Committee proposed that the complete exclusion of Cabinet records from the operation of the Act be deleted and replaced with an exemption that would not be subject to an injury test.
In April 2005, the Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler introduced a discussion paper entitled A Comprehensive Framework for Access to Information Reform.
[15] Later in 2005, a draft bill, entitled the Open Government Act, was tabled before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.
Developed by Information Commissioner John Reid at the request of the Standing Committee, the proposed act included substantial changes to the law.
[21] The purpose of the Paper was to identify the key points emerging from the major studies of the Act that had been conducted over the previous two decades, and to analyze in some detail some recent proposals concerning the reworking of the legislation.
The Paper goes on to report that, in response, Canada's information and privacy commissioners suggested that the Action Plan on Open Government represents a missed opportunity for comprehensive reform of the Act.
She observed, "Our investigations in recent years have demonstrated not only the obsolescence of the statute but also a number of deficiencies in it which may well impede or hamper the development of a truly open government that is receptive to the needs of its citizens and its economy and in step with other administrations."
During his Campaign in 2015, candidate Justin Trudeau, and the Liberal Party he was representing, promised to change the Access to Information Act to include the Prime Minister's and Cabinet Office within its scope.
Most critiques of the changes to the act concerned the broken promise from the election, while most of the people defending the proposal focused on expanded proactive disclosure.
Gibbs is the executive director of the group Evidence for Democracy, and she publicly supported other parts of the act, but was overall disappointed with the Liberals not living up to their election promise.
Université de Moncton professor Donald Savoie's 2003 book, Breaking the Bargain,[23] observes that in Canada there is a reluctance to put anything in writing, including e-mail, that might find its way into public discourse.
The report notes that "successive Information Commissioners have criticised a 'culture of secrecy' in Ottawa, in which government departments frustrate the will of Parliament with impunity."
Regarding the former, the "balance of forces" between the "sharply opposed interests" for and against disclosure may not "be preserved over time; one side may prove more skilled at developing new strategies than the other.
Evidence suggests that federal institutions have developed techniques for managing politically sensitive requests which now undercut basic principles of the ATIA."
These techniques were observed to result in substantial delays in processing information requests perceived to be politically sensitive, possibly because they originated from journalists.
For many years, the difficulty [had] centered on the exclusion of Crown Corporations; more recently, the problem has extended to include government contractors and a range of quasi-governmental entities that perform critical public functions."
On 29 September 2009, Stanley Tromp, the Freedom of Information caucus coordinator of the Canadian Association of Journalists and author of the 2008 Fallen Behind report, addressed the Conference for Parliamentarians: Transparency in the Digital Era.
The University College London study comparing Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland was published in Government Information Quarterly.
In the book, Mr. Rathgeber contrasted the current state of Canadian democracy to the founding principles of responsible government established by the Fathers of Confederation in 1867.
He examined the consequences of the inability or disincentive of modern elected representatives to perform their constitutionally mandated duty to hold the prime minister and his cabinet to account and the resultant disregard with which the executive now views Parliament.
In September 2014, Canadian Press reported that a previously obscure Treasury Board directive in the summer of 2013 introduced a policy that required federal bureaucrats to consult departmental lawyers about whether documents should be classified as secrets.
Suzanne Legault,[22] the Commissioner incumbent in this period, expressed concern, describing the scope of the new basis for exclusion from release as "extremely broad", and failing to "respect fundamental tenets of freedom of information".
Liberal Member of Parliament John McKay described his attempts to extract information required to make "independent judgments" in the fulfillment of parliamentary duties as "an exercise in frustration".
Michael Ferguson (Auditor General) said that his attempts in early 2014 to audit public pension plans to evaluate their long-term health had been stymied by bureaucrats at Department of Finance and Treasury Board.