Public funds spent on
legal arguments to keep records barred from public
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The public may soon be able
to read more internal reports about provincial health services after a ruling
ordered them opened up.
A year ago, this journalist
had applied though the B.C. freedom of information law for summaries of five
internal audits from the Provincial Health Services Authority. The PHSA
refused, and an appeal was sent to the information and privacy commissioner in
Victoria.
On Jan. 19, the commissioners adjudicator Jay Fedorak
ordered two of the summaries released in full, and parts of the other three.
(The PHSA has 30 days to appeal the order to court, and has not yet said if it
will.)
Over the past year, as the
basis for news stories, the Courier has used FOI to obtain audits from
Vancouver city hall and the B.C. finance ministrys
comptroller general. These dealt with topics such as health and safety, and the
wasteful spending of public funds. But now these reports are becoming much
harder to access, because these public bodies have started claiming more
exemptions to keep them secret. The Courier has appealed these withholdings to
the commissioner, and await rulings on them.
The PHSA seems to have gone
out of its way to throw up anything and everything to keep these records
secret, and they failed, said Vincent Gogolek,
executive director of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.
They even tried to give themselves the power to hold board meetings in secret
to justify keeping the records out of the public eye. Hopefully they have
learned their lesson, and will stop wasting everybody's time and resources to
try to block transparency."
Unlike the five B.C. regional
health authorities, the PHSA is responsible for health care services that must
be delivered provincially. From its headquarters at 1380 Burrard St., it
oversees the B.C. Cancer Agency, the B.C. Centre for Disease Control and
Prevention, the B.C. Mental Health Society, the B.C. Transplant Society, the Childrens and Womens Health
Centre, and the B.C. Ambulance Service. Part of a complex network, and with
$2.28 billion in revenue for 2011/12, the PHSA trains 4,000 healthcare
students, helps plan the HIV/AIDS program, and seeks to reduce B.C. health
costs by consolidating services, such as research ($180 million annually),
chest surgery and trauma services.
Utilizing lawyers at public
expense, the PHSA made its arguments using in-camera affidavits. Even the
audits topic headings were so sensitive, Fedorak
wrote, that he could not mention them in his public order. The authority kept
all five summaries secret by claiming exemptions in the FOI law, that is,
releasing them would reveal the substance of deliberations (under section 12),
and it would also reveal advice or recommendations (section 13).
But to use section 12, a
public body must have a statutory authority to meet in private, and Fedorak found the PHSA did not have this authority as it
had claimed. On section 13, he wrote that most of the audits were not made up
of advice, but of factual background data instead, so the PHSA could only
withhold some parts, not all of them.
Fedorak also rejected the PHSAs
claim that releasing the audits could cause it financial harm (section 17)
because it lacked proof, writing: The PHSA makes merely bald assertions about
potential harm that is vague and speculative.
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