We have a new website, consolidating our blog and our main website in one place.
http://nsrighttoknow.ca/ now points to our new site. Please refresh your browser if you still see the old site.
http://nsrighttoknow.ca/rtk-news/ points to the RTK/FOI blog.
It will be a couple days before everything works perfectly, so please bear with us.
"News has to be subsidized because society’s truth-tellers can’t be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market... Markets supply less reporting than democracies demand."
-- Clay Shirky, Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic, July 9, 2011 via The Technium, Found Quotes, 8
Almost 90 countries around the world have enacted access to information (ATI) legislation, and in many of these countries, reforms and amendments are either being considered or have been passed. However, even minor adjustments to the legal framework around ATI laws can have substantial impact on how the law is implemented and used.
While access to information laws are increasingly a key subject of studies on governance reforms, within the literature there has been less emphasis placed on the impact of amendments to ATI laws and little analysis done to understand the processes that propelled such reforms forward.
Targeted for practitioners working in governance and transparency issues and as part of its Governance Working Paper series, the World Bank Institute has recently published Amending Access to Information Legislation: Legal and Political Issues by Toby Mendel, Executive Director of Centre for Law and Democracy.
The working paper looks at the main substantive issues ATI reform attempts have targeted and what legal forms they may take. It also examines the role different actors—civil society, the media, oversight bodies, parliaments, and political leaders—can play in helping support the adoption of reforms that promote openness and defeat those that erect barriers.
Image via Wikipedia"....Civilization, put quite simply, consists in our giving ourselves, as human beings, to the effort to attain the perfecting of the human race and actualization of progress of every sort in the circumstances of humanity and of the objective world. This mental attitude, however, involves a double predisposition: firstly, we must be prepared to act affirmatively toward the world and life; secondly, we must become ethical."
- Albert Schweitzer 1923 book "The Philosophy of Civilization"
via Vikas Shah, Thought Economics, July 2011 http://thoughteconomics.blogspot.com/
 Hill Times (subscription) | Many public servants aren't standing up to political interference in access ... Hill Times (subscription) He said access to information release packages should be shown to political staff only as a courtesy so that they can prepare their communications plan. "The access to information request happens, you then present it and say, 'Here's what the request ... |
For those who missed it, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has announced it is launching an open data portal.
This is exciting news. On Monday I was interviewed about the initiative by Embassy Magazine which published the resulting article (behind their paywall) ...
But an ONS spokesperson said: 'It is unlikely that making housing associations subject to FOI would lead to a reclassification as it would not have a large impact on the level of public control.' A Communities and Local Government department ... ...
We already spend at least £200000 on dealing with FOI requests for information every year. The number of requests has been almost doubling every year - in 2010 we answered 969 enquiries up from 203 in 2005." ...
"We're the only province in Canada that doesn't do that," he said. "Something is wrong here." Marin also chided the government for its secrecy instead of embracing proactive disclosure. "Today the expectation is that information from the government ...
Globe and Mail
Ontario must get with the times on transparency, watchdog says
Globe and Mail
The practice of having to file a complicated access-to-information request is "literally last century," André Marin said in his annual report, released on Tuesday. "People want information on what their government is doing, they want it to be easy to ...
Making the government more accountable
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Making+government+more+accountable/5009392/story.html#ixzz1QUwzaXVQ
 The Guardian | Top-paid civil servants lose right to wage privacy The Guardian The ruling is significant because for the first time, the commission has overruled privacy safeguards for individuals contained in the Data Protection Act in the name of greater government transparency. The government indicated that itbacked the ... and more » |
| The Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defence and Birmingham City Council could all face formal regulatory action if they fail to comply with terms they have agreed to in improving their freedom of information (FoI) response times, the Information ... See all stories on this topic » |  Public Service |
Transparency and Accountability Initiative
Open Society Foundation–London UK
Application Deadline: July 6, 2011
http://www.soros.org/about/locations/london/pota20110617
via CAPAPA.org
FOIA Facts: The Most Transparent Administration in History? | LLRX.com
Residents of Minnesota now have a new way to keep track of what's happening in their state with the launch of OpenGovernment Minnesota. The "land of 10,000 lakes" is the latest state added to OpenGovernment, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, along with support from the Minnesota Historical Society.
Visit MN.opengovernment.org to get the real story behind what's happening in government across the state via official government information, local news coverage, blog posts and social media alerts.
Writes David Moore on the OpenGovernment blog:
Now folks in Minnesota can track with ease everything their state legislature does — all the bills that are proposed, votes that are taken, money that was raised, and more. We've timed the launch of this, the sixth U.S. state on OpenGovernment, to coincide with the Netroots Nation conference ongoing this weekend in Minneapolis / St. Paul. We're pleased to share this new public resource for accountability in government and citizen watchdogging with all the political bloggers & issue-based activists there.The Sunlight Labs Open States project developed the legislative backend for OpenGovernment. Supported in part by the work of volunteers, the Open States project's goal is to collect and scrape legislative data from all 50 state legislatures and make it available online in a unified, developer-friendly format.
Iceland's new constitution is being written with citizen input via the Web, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
The VPD's FOI policies haven't gotten as much attention as BC Ferries', but they were actually the first agency in BC to begin posting FOI records online, something it started doing several years ago. Given Denham's strong criticism of such policies, ...
On June 1, 2011, Nova Scotia Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Review Officer, Dulcie McCallum released the following Review
Report The full Report can be found on our website at http://www.foipop.ns.ca/rep_recent.html
FI-10-41/FI-10-85/FI-10-86/FI-10-87
Report Release Date: June 1, 2011
Public Body: Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal
Primary Issues: Whether the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal ["Transportation"] appropriately applied the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act ["Act"] and, in
particular:
1. Whether the public interest provision overrides all of the other
exemption(s) claimed by Transportation.
2. Whether Transportation has caused inordinate delay. Whether the adequacy of the search for the Record has contributed to the delay.
Whether Transportation's failure to meet its statutory duty to assist has contributed to the delay.
3. Whether "not responsive" can be used as an exemption.
Secondary Issues: The following are issues that arose during the Review process but which the Review Officer did not need to make Findings and Recommendations in order to dispose of the Review:
1. If the information that withheld under s. 12 of the Act were to be disclosed, whether the conduct of intergovernmental relations between the Government of Nova Scotia and a municipal unit would be harmed.
2. Whether the information withheld under s. 14 of the Act fits the definition of advice or recommendations.
3. If the information withheld under s. 17 of the Act were to be disclosed, whether the government would suffer financial or economic harm.
4. Whether the information withheld under s. 20 of the Act fits the definition of personal information. Whether the disclosure would be an unreasonable invasion of privacy. Whether s. 20(4) of the Act applies.
5. Whether the three-part test applies to the information withheld under s. 21 of the Act.
6. Where it has been determined that a discretionary exemption applies, whether Transportation has properly exercised its discretion to apply it.
Record at Issue: Pursuant to s. 38 of the Act, Transportation has provided the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy ["FOIPOP"] Review Office with a copy of the complete Record, including the information withheld from the Applicant. At no time are the contents of the Record disclosed or the Record itself released to the Applicant by the FOIPOP Review Officer or her delegated staff.
The Record consists of a number of document types including letters, emails, meeting minutes, handwritten notes and memorandums. The Applicant has chosen to focus on "key documents".
Summary: An Applicant made multiple Applications for Access to a Record on behalf of a Residents' Group referred to as Protect the Bay. The multiple Requests for Review of the Transportation's decisions to withhold a significant portion of the Records were consolidated into one Review, as the Applications for Access to a Record were the same but for various consecutive time periods. Transportation withheld a large portion of the Record relying on many exemptions and a "not responsive" designation. The Review Officer found that the public interest override was paramount and that it should be applied in this case to release the remainder of the Record except for third party personal information.
Findings: The Review Officer made the following Findings:
1. I agree with Transportation's decision to waive the fees based on public interest.
2. I find that the public interest in s. 31 of the Act is paramount and applies to the entire Record except for personal information of third parties.
3. I find that Transportation caused inordinate delay in this Review.
4. I find that the back and forth trying to pin down the exact parameters and content of the Record contributed to the delay.
5. I find that Transportation essentially ignored my decision to expedite the Review and caused delay by choosing to exceed the time allotments given to public bodies.
6. I find the resulting delays were unnecessary and inappropriate.
7. I find that "not responsive" cannot be used as if it were an exemption to withhold information that does not fit within any of the exemptions simply because the public body does not want to release it.
8. I find there are strings of emails identified as "not responsive" but clearly do not fit this description.
9. I find that Transportation's use of "not responsive" is wholly inappropriate and not permitted under the Nova Scotia legislation.
Citizens have a right to access a Record.
10. I find that "not responsive" has been used by Transportation to shelter access to parts of the Record that are in fact responsive and do not fall under any exemption claimed.
Recommendations: The Review Officer made the following Recommendations to Transportation:
1. Disclose the remainder of the Record, the portion previously withheld under a number of exemptions, with only third party personal information severed, because disclosure is clearly in the public interest. This would include any portion that relates to other projects as it has been identified as part of the responsive Record by Transportation.
2. In future Reviews, Transportation should make every effort to comply with any term or condition imposed by the Review Officer including the condition to expedite a Review.
Key Words: accurate, burden, complete, confidential, consent, delay, discombobulating, discretion, duty to assist, environment, expedited, fees, financial harm, limited and specific, justice delayed, justice denied, onus, open, nonsensical, not responsive, open-house, override, paramount, personal information, public interest, public meeting, third parties, waiver.
Statutes Considered: Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, ss. 2, 5(2), 7, 31, 38.
Case Authorities Cited: NS Review Reports FI-02-20, FI-08-107, FI-00-29, FI-07-58, FI-07-60, FI-07-72, FI-06-71(M), FI-07-59, FI-10-49/FI-10-51, Grant v. Torstar Corp., 2009 SCC 61, Ontario (Public Safety and Security) v. Criminal Lawyers' Association, 2010 SCC 23.
Cheers,
Mary Kennedy
Intake/Administration
Freedom of Information & Protection of Privacy Review Office
Tel: (902) 424-4684
Fax: (902) 424-8303
Web: www.foipop.ns.ca
Over at the Beyond the Commons blog Aaron Wherry has a series of quotes from recent speeches on healthcare by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in which the one constant keyword is... accountability.
Who can blame him?
Take everyone promising to limit growth to a still unsustainable 6% (gulp) and throw in some dubiously costly projects ($1 billion spent on e-health records in Ontario when an open source solution - VistA - could likely have been implemented at a fraction of the cost) and the obvious question is... what is the country going to do about healthcare costs?
I don't want to claim that open data can solve the problem. It can't. There isn't going to be a single solution. But I think it could help spread best practices, improve customer choice and service as well as possibly yield other potential benefits.
Anyone who's been around me for the last month knows about my restaurant inspection open data example (which could also yield healthcare savings) but I think we can go bigger. A Federal Government that is serious about accountability in Healthcare needs to build a system where that accountability isn't just between the provinces and the feds, it needs to be between the Healthcare system and its users; us.
Since the feds usually attach several provisions to their healthcare dollars, the one I'd like to see is an open data provision. One where provinces, and hospitals are required to track and make open a whole set of performance data, in machine readable formats, in a common national standard, that anyone in Canada (or around the world) can download and access.
Some of the data I'd love to see mandated to be tracked and shared, includes:
I can imagine a slew of services and analysis that emerge from these, if nothing than a citizenry that is better informed about the true state of its healthcare system. Even something as simple as being able to check ER wait times at all the hospitals near you, so you can drive to the one where the wait times are shortest. That would be nice.
Of course, if the Prime Minister wants to go beyond accountability and think about how data could directly reduce costs, he might take a look at one initiative launched south of the border.
If he did, he might be persuaded to demand that the provinces share a set of anonymized patient records to see if academics or others in the country might be able to build better models for how we should manage healthcare costs. In January of this year I witnessed the launch of the $3 million dollar Heritage Health Prize at the O'Reilly Strata Conference in San Diego. It is a stunningly ambitious, but realistic effort. As the press release notes:
Contestants in the challenge will be provided with a data set consisting of the de-identified medical records of 100,000 patients from the 2008 calendar year. Contestants will then be required to create a predictive algorithm to predict who was hospitalized during the 2009 calendar year. HPN will award the $3 million prize(more than twice what is paid for the Nobel Prize in medicine) to the first participant or team that passes the required level of predictive accuracy. In addition, there will be milestone prizes along the way, which will be awarded to teams leading the competition at various points in time.
In essence Heritage Health is doing to patient management what Netflix (through the $1M Netflix prize) did to movie selections. It's crowdsourcing the problem to get better results.
The problem is, any algorithm developed by the winners of the Heritage Health Prize will belong to... Heritage Health. This means the benefits of this innovation cannot benefit Canadians (nor anyone else). So why not launch a prize of our own. We have more data, I suspect our data is better (not limited to a single state) and we could place the winning algorithm in the public domain so that it can benefit all of humanity. If Canadian data helped find efficiencies that lowered healthcare costs and improved healthcare outcomes for everyone in the world... it could be the biggest contribution to global healthcare by Canada since Federick Banting discovered insulin and rescued diabetics everywhere.
Of course, open data, and sharing (even anonymized) patient data would be a radical experiment for government, something new, bold and different. But 6% growth is itself unsustainable and Canadians need to see that their government can do something bold, new and innovative. These initiatives would fit the bill.
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