Why do Cons have to hide their mandate taking it all the way to the top court? What is it that they’re keeping from public eyes?
Could be nothing we don’t already know, just things they don’t want to bring up again
Like Ford saying we don’t need to do anything about systemic racism because it exists everywhere
Or his nephew (minister of multiculturalism) saying blacks need to learn to be Canadian
Asshole gets handed a “get out of jail free” card yet again.
Jayzuz. :(
Honestly, if Ontario voters weren’t braindead morons, this court case would be irrelevant. Just the fact that he fought so hard to keep the letters secret should have killed him at the ballot box.
“The Letters are revealing of the substance of Cabinet deliberations, both on their face and when compared against what government actually does,” wrote Justice Andromache Karakatsanis in the majority decision
Umm hey isn’t the point to know this? Like I’d prefer to know what the substance of cabinet deliberations than not.
Government should be transparent, not 30 cheeseburgers thick opaque.
Then FIPPA has to be changed. Right now the act allows for cabinet deliberations to be kept confidential:
Maybe that makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t. But that’s the law as written today and the court decided that these letters fall under that carve-out.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the Ontario government does not have to disclose Premier Doug Ford’s mandate letters in a unanimous decision issued Friday.
Mandate letters traditionally lay out the marching orders a premier has for each of their ministers after taking office — and have been routinely released by governments across the country.
“FIPPA’s Cabinet records exemption was a critical part of the balance the legislature struck between public access to information and necessary spheres of government confidentiality,” she wrote.
Justice Suzanne Côté wrote a concurrent decision for the case, which agreed that the mandate letters are exempt from disclosure but disagreed about the standard of review.
The Ontario government’s submissions in the case had argued the information and privacy commissioner took a “narrow and restrictive approach” interpreting “substance of deliberations,” which amounts to “an unwarranted incursion into the functioning of cabinet.”
They argued against the government’s interpretation of the legislation, saying it would lead to “absurd results” including keeping secret “any record that revealed that a particular topic had been identified by the premier as a policy priority.”
The original article contains 830 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
