Ford Government Passes Budget Letting Premier, Ministers Keep Records Secret

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Moments that look procedural on paper can alter how a province is watched for years. Ontario’s latest budget bill did exactly that, moving beyond spending and tax measures to rewrite the rules around who can ask for government records and what can be kept outside public view.

This piece breaks the story into 10 key parts: what the Ford government passed, how the law changes access to records, why the retroactive language matters, what role Doug Ford’s phone-record fight played, how the government defended the move, why Ontario’s privacy watchdog pushed back, and what all of it could mean for accountability in the years ahead.

A Budget Bill With Far Bigger Consequences

Bill 97 was not presented as a stand-alone transparency bill. It was the Ford government’s 2026 budget legislation, an omnibus package tied to a $244.2 billion fiscal plan and a wide range of unrelated measures. Buried inside that bill was Schedule 7, which amended Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, better known as FIPPA. That matters because budget bills often move quickly and are framed as confidence matters, which can make careful scrutiny of individual provisions harder.

That is why critics reacted so sharply. What looked, at first glance, like a technical records amendment was actually a change to the rules governing access to information at the highest political levels of provincial government. Once Bill 97 passed third reading on April 23 and received Royal Assent on April 24, the issue stopped being a proposal and became law. In practical terms, a fight about records and oversight was folded into a bill most people would associate with spending plans, affordability measures and fiscal policy.

What The New Law Actually Carves Out

The most important change is simple in concept but significant in effect. Bill 97 adds new subsections to FIPPA stating that the law does not apply to records in the custody of a minister or a minister’s office, and does not apply to records under the control of a minister or a minister’s office unless those records are in the custody of the institutional side of government. The same framework is extended, with necessary modifications, to parliamentary assistants and their offices.

That wording creates a sharper divide between the political side of government and the institutional public-service side. Records held inside ministers’ political offices are treated differently from records sitting with ministries and institutions that are already clearly subject to FIPPA. The distinction may sound technical, but it can shape where records live, how requesters frame access applications, and what material can be reached at all. It also means the title’s claim about records being kept secret is rooted in a real legislative shift: a large category of top-level political-office records has been pushed outside the usual provincial access regime.

The Retroactive Clause Is What Made This Explosive

If the bill had only changed future access requests, the political backlash would still have been serious. What made the change especially combustible was the retroactive design. Bill 97 says the new rules apply even to records created before Royal Assent. It also states that anyone who had a right of access before the law passed ceases to have that right, even if the request had already been filed. More striking still, prior orders or decisions under FIPPA are rendered ineffective to the extent they granted access to records now excluded.

That is the part that transformed a policy argument into a constitutional-feeling controversy. Retroactivity is not just about setting new rules for tomorrow; it rewrites the legal footing of yesterday’s disputes. Bill 97 goes even further symbolically by deeming the relevant subsection to have come into force on January 1, 1988. For critics, that looked like an attempt to erase existing claims after the fact. For supporters, it was positioned as a clean legal reset. Either way, retroactive lawmaking tends to heighten public suspicion because it feels less like routine housekeeping and more like an effort to shut a door that was already open.

The Phone-Records Fight Gave The Debate A Face

The legal fight over Premier Doug Ford’s personal cellphone records gave this issue a vivid, easy-to-understand example. Earlier this year, a panel of Ontario judges rejected an attempt to block the release process for government-related call information on Ford’s personal phone, upholding the watchdog’s view that the Cabinet Office had obligations to retrieve and review relevant material connected to government business. The case emerged after records from Ford’s official government phone showed no call activity during periods of interest, prompting further questions about his personal device.

That background made the timing of Bill 97 impossible to ignore. News coverage repeatedly connected the budget amendments to the phone-record dispute, and opposition parties hammered that point in the legislature. The bill’s retroactive language intensified the perception that the government was not merely modernizing an old statute but responding to a real, live transparency threat. Even people who never file freedom-of-information requests could understand the symbolism: if a premier uses a personal phone for public business, should those records stay reachable? Bill 97 answered that question in a way that dramatically narrowed the public route for getting them.

Why This Matters To More Than Journalists

Governments often talk about freedom-of-information battles as though they mainly concern media organizations. Ontario’s own privacy watchdog argued the numbers tell a different story. In 2024, the province processed 27,344 provincial FOI requests, and only 1,092 of them, about 4 per cent, came from the media. More than 95 per cent came from individuals, businesses, researchers and community organizations. That statistic reframes the debate immediately.

The people affected by access-law changes are not just reporters chasing headlines. They include families trying to understand a decision, businesses seeking government records that affect contracts or regulation, academics tracing how policy was formed, and civil-society groups testing official claims against documentary evidence. That is why this issue can feel abstract until a scandal erupts, then suddenly feel essential. Most of the time, records laws operate in the background. But when public trust is strained, the ability to ask for documents becomes one of the few ways outsiders can reconstruct who knew what, when decisions were made, and whether political messaging matches the paper trail.

The Government’s Defence: Modernization, Privacy And Alignment

The Ford government has consistently framed the changes as an update to an outdated system. In the 2026 budget, Ontario said its privacy and access laws had gone nearly four decades without major overhaul and argued the province needed modernized timelines, stronger privacy safeguards and a system more closely aligned with other jurisdictions in Canada. The government also said the changes would support more cost-efficient administration and a more secure public-information framework.

Politically, the defence went further. Doug Ford argued that he gives out his cellphone number widely and that people contact him with sensitive personal matters, while Minister Stephen Crawford suggested the overwhelming majority of records people care about still sit with the public service. That line is designed to reassure voters that ordinary access rights remain intact. It is not a frivolous argument: many records do, in fact, remain accessible through ministries and institutions. But the weakness in the government’s case is that modernization usually implies improving service without shrinking basic rights. Once the reform crossed into excluding political-office records outright, the debate shifted from efficiency to legitimacy.

The Watchdog’s Rebuttal Was Direct And Unusually Sharp

Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner did not respond in cautious bureaucratic language. Patricia Kosseim warned that the proposed changes would diminish the public’s right to information, especially because they excluded records held by the premier, cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants and political staff, and did so retroactively. Her office argued that this was not real modernization because FIPPA already contains established exemptions for personal information, confidential commercial information and cabinet confidences.

That rebuttal matters because it came from the independent officer responsible for overseeing the very system being changed. The commissioner also challenged the government’s alignment argument, publishing a cross-Canada comparison showing that several jurisdictions, including British Columbia, Manitoba and New Brunswick, still cover ministers’ offices while carving out personal or constituency records through narrower exemptions. Kosseim went even further by warning that removing these records from FIPPA could create cybersecurity and governance risks if government-related material remains on personal devices and accounts outside the statute’s ordinary safeguards. In other words, the watchdog’s case was not just that the change reduced transparency, but that it solved the wrong problem in the wrong way.

Greenbelt Is The Shadow Hanging Over Everything

No discussion of this law can be separated from the Greenbelt scandal. That controversy reshaped how Ontarians think about informal political channels, developer access and the importance of records. Ontario’s Auditor General found that the process used to remove 15 sites totalling about 7,400 acres from Greenbelt protection was biased and dismissive of orderly land-use planning. The Integrity Commissioner separately concluded that then-housing minister Steve Clark contravened ethics rules by failing to oversee a process that improperly furthered the private interests of certain developers.

Those findings explain why records housed in political offices now attract such intense attention. When scandals emerge, investigators, journalists and watchdogs often need texts, emails, briefing materials, calendars and call logs to trace influence and decision-making. In ordinary times, records law can feel procedural; in scandal, it becomes a map of power. That is why opposition politicians and critics kept returning to Greenbelt when attacking Bill 97. Even if the statute is written generally, the public memory surrounding it is not. The Greenbelt affair taught Ontario that what sits on a device, in a personal account or in a political office can matter enormously once a government decision starts to unravel.

How The Bill Moved Through Queen’s Park

The substance of Bill 97 drew fire, but so did the process used to pass it. Official legislative records show the government moved closure at second reading on April 2, then later used time allocation on April 21, discharged the bill from committee and ordered it to third reading. The final third-reading vote was 57 to 33. Reporting from Queen’s Park also noted that Progressive Conservative members bypassed the committee’s public-hearing stage, which is normally one of the few places outside voices can weigh in on legislation before it becomes law.

That procedural route matters because transparency reforms are the kind of measures many observers expect to receive extra sunlight, not less. A government with a strong majority can pass a bill quickly, especially when it is tied to the budget. But speed carries a political cost when the bill is about limiting access to information. The optics become almost self-defeating: a law criticized for reducing transparency is itself advanced through a process critics say offered too little scrutiny. Even for supporters of the policy, that sequence made the government’s modernization narrative harder to sell.

What Happens Next For Accountability In Ontario

The immediate effect is clear: Ontario’s freedom-of-information landscape is narrower at the political-office level than it was before Bill 97. Some provisions in Schedule 7 come into force later, but the retroactive ministerial-office exclusion was designed to reach back to January 1, 1988. That means the change is not just prospective housekeeping. It is a structural reset that alters the ground under pending disputes and future requests alike.

The longer-term story will be about adaptation. Requesters will likely focus more heavily on records that remain in the custody of ministries and institutions, while watchdogs, auditors, courts and investigative reporters may need to rely more on indirect routes to reconstruct decision-making. The government may insist that everyday access remains largely intact, and in many cases that will be true. But the symbolic damage is harder to measure and may matter more over time. In democracies, secrecy debates are rarely only about one phone, one scandal or one premier. They are about whether citizens believe the rules are being adjusted for better governance or for better insulation from scrutiny.

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