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July
3 , 2003
CITY ORDERED TO RELEASE RED HILL DOCUMENTS
The
City of Hamilton has lost a long battle to prevent release
of studies related to the proposed Red Hill Creek Expressway.
A decision of the provincial Information and Privacy Commissioner
has ruled that the City cannot use “client-solicitor
privilege” to prevent the release of such documents.
Shortly
after the beginning of the federal environmental assessment
of the expressway in June 1998, the City began to block
the release of consultant studies and other documents on
the predicted impacts of the controversial expressway. Citizens,
and even anti-expressway members of City Council, were denied
access to these materials, including everything related
to the endangered Southern Flying Squirrel populations in
Red Hill Valley.
Freedom
of information requests were filed by several parties in
an attempt to obtain some 76 documents related to the squirrel
studies which the City refused to release. The City’s
refusal was appealed to the Office of the Information and
Privacy Commissioner. In his decision, senior adjudicator
David Goodis rejected extensive legal arguments by City
lawyers and ruled that client-solicitor privilege “does
not apply to any of the records at issue”. He ordered
them all released.
He
based his decision largely on the fact that the studies
were required under a 1997 cabinet order that included an
expectation that “the progress and results of the study
would be available to the public”. However, the ruling
comes months after the last opportunity for public comment
on expressway studies, so the goal of the City to keep the
reports secret until they were no longer useful may have
been achieved even though it was done illegally. Hamilton
officials have repeatedly stated that the public discussion
about the expressway is over and that construction of the
project will begin this year.
“Using
client-solicitor privilege to block access to public documents
was a scam from the start”, said Don McLean, chair
of Friends of Red Hill Valley. “The provincial government
should now require the release of all the expressway documents
and allow for a fair public review.”
The
full text of the adjudicator’s decision can be found
at
http://www.ipc.on.ca/scripts/index_.asp?
action=31&N_ID=1&P_ID=14423&U_ID=0
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