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Bill 9: The Death Knell of Freedom Information by the BC NDP

By Arthur McInnis
June 6, 2026


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Putting it mildly:

“The changes to freedom-of-information legislation will weaken BC’s democratic infrastructure.”

That’s not a critic. That’s not an opposition MLA. That is BC’s Privacy Commissioner, Michael McEvoy, the independent officer of the legislature whose sole job is to protect your right to information, describing his own government’s bill. When the watchdog appointed to guard the henhouse tells you the fox just rewrote the rules, you should probably read the rules.

Bill 9, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Act, 2026, was introduced on February 26 and has passed second reading over strong opposition from the public and MLAs. The government called it modernisation. Here is what it actually does.

1. The Premier’s Office Is Now Off-Limits

The most structurally significant change in Bill 9 exempts the Premier’s office from FOI access requests entirely. This is where McEvoy landed hardest: the Premier’s office is where policy gets made, where developer meetings happen, where political decisions get laundered into administrative ones. Exempting it from FIPPA isn’t a housekeeping measure. It is the single most consequential blow to government transparency in a generation.

The logic of FOI has always been that public power is subject to public scrutiny. The Premier’s office holds more public power than any other office in the province. Bill 9 says not anymore.

2. “Abusive” Requests, Defined by the Government

Bill 9 allows public bodies to apply to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner to disregard FOI requests they deem “abusive or malicious” or that would “unreasonably interfere with operations.” The problem is not the concept, since genuinely harassing requests do exist. The problem is the definition. There isn’t one.

The statute gives no criteria for what makes a request “abusive.” That determination is made initially by the head of the public body, the same people with an institutional interest in not releasing the records.  

The BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, (FIPA) is a non-profit civil liberties and transparency organization that advocates for access-to-information and privacy rights in British Columbia and Canada. Its president Mike Larsen, put it precisely: the Bill “tips the balance of power away from requesters and more towards public bodies that have expanded authorities to use discretion.”

A persistent journalist. A neighbourhood association tracking a development file. A citizen who has filed multiple requests on the same issue because the government keeps redacting the answers. Under Bill 9, any of these could be labelled “abusive” and the request shelved. Without a statutory definition, there is nothing meaningful to appeal.

3. “Without Delay” Becomes “Without Unreasonable Delay”

In the unamended Act, public bodies were required to respond “without delay.” Bill 9 changes that to “without unreasonable delay.” Three words. One insertion. The entire meaning shifts.

“Without delay” is a standard. “Without unreasonable delay” is an invitation to argue. Courts and tribunals will spend years litigating what counts as “unreasonable” in each context, while requesters wait. This is not modernization. It is the deliberate insertion of ambiguity into a provision that was clear.

4. Bureaucrats Now Decide Whether Your Request Is Specific Enough

Under Bill 9, the head of a public body has statutory authority to determine whether a request contains “enough detail.” If they decide it doesn’t, they can demand clarification before processing begins, and the clock doesn’t run while they wait.

The unamended Act’s access-as-default principle required governments to interpret requests generously and respond to what was being sought. This amendment inverts that. Combined with the “abusive request” power, a determined public body now has two procedural off-ramps before it ever has to open a file.

5. A Fee the Privacy Commissioner Cannot Waive

After public pressure, the government reduced the application fee from the proposed $25 to $10. But the critical problem remains: the Privacy Commissioner has no authority to waive it, even where it is clearly in the public interest. This is unique in Canada. Ontario charges $5. In every other province, the oversight body retains discretion to waive fees for journalists, researchers, low-income requesters, and matters of genuine public interest. In BC, under Bill 9, you pay or you don’t get to ask.

6. Diana Gibson MLA is Leading the Charge

Diana Gibson is the cabinet minister responsible for advancing Bill 9, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Act, 2026. As the NDP MLA for Oak Bay–Gordon Head, she was appointed Minister of Citizens’ Services in July 2025, a portfolio that carries responsibility for B.C.’s freedom of information and privacy regime. In that capacity, she is the minister sponsoring Bill 9 and steering it through the Legislative Assembly, both procedurally and politically.

The government’s own communications make her role explicit. In a May 3, 2026 news release, Gibson issues a formal “Minister’s statement about amendments to Bill 9,” in which she states that she is introducing “targeted amendments” to the bill, confirming that she is the member in charge of piloting the legislation and adjusting it in response to criticism. In media coverage of the prolonged, late‑night debates over Bill 9, Gibson is quoted as “Minister of Citizen Services Diana Gibson,” defending the Bill as a response to growing FOI volumes and complexity and insisting that it keeps access and privacy laws “strong, modern and effective.” In practice, this places her at the centre of the government’s effort to justify the Bill, frame it as modernization, and push it past opposition from other parties and civil‑society critics.

Diana Gibson is a co-founder of the Firelight Group, and as a former CEO/Director of the organisation along with her husband Councillor Dave Thompson, also a co‑founder, senior researcher and director of the Firelight Group, they work with Indigenous communities. Firelight’s own descriptions emphasise that it provides research, socio‑economic analysis, Indigenous knowledge documentation and negotiation support to Indigenous Nations in relation to land, resource and impact assessment processes. Its research is often used as evidentiary or background material in regulatory hearings and litigation involving resource projects and territorial rights such as Gitxaała v. British Columbia (Chief Gold Commissioner), 2025 BCCA 430.

Victoria City Hall Is Watching, and No Doubt Taking Notes

Here is what concerns me most, and what I don’t think has been said clearly enough: the ideological current that produced Bill 9 at the provincial level runs all the way down to City Hall.

Victoria’s Council majority is politically aligned with the NDP government that designed these changes. That is not a coincidence to be overlooked, it is a transmission mechanism. When a provincial government of a particular ideological disposition normalises restricting access, expanding bureaucratic discretion, and shielding executive decision-making from scrutiny, it does not stay at the provincial level. It percolates. It sets the tone. It becomes, implicitly, permission.

FIPPA applies to municipalities. Victoria City Hall is a public body under the Act. Every power Bill 9 has just handed to provincial ministries is also now available to your local Council: the authority to deem your request insufficiently detailed, to flag your persistence as “abusive,” to respond on a timeline that is merely not “unreasonable” rather than prompt.

Think about what Victoria residents have tried to FOI in recent years: development permit records, MDA correspondence, planning communications, heritage assessments. These are exactly the categories of records that bureaucratic gatekeeping, now statutorily legitimised, is most useful for delaying or defeating.

The risk is not hypothetical. It is that Victoria City Hall, sharing both the ideological priors and the political culture of the government that drafted Bill 9, treats the new powers not as a last resort but as a template. That a request deemed inconvenient gets labelled insufficiently detailed. That a citizen who has filed three requests on the same development file finds their fourth one flagged as abusive. That the City takes its cue from the Premier’s exemption and quietly expands the categories of information it considers beyond public reach.

FOI is not a bureaucratic technicality. It is the mechanism through which citizens verify whether what they’re being told is true. When governments weaken it at the top, the habit of opacity flows downhill.

The province has decided transparency was negotiable. Victoria residents should ask whether their City Council agrees and Council should publicly commit to not using the new restrictive powers Bill 9 is handing them.

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See also:

Index of articles regarding Law and Bylaw – CRD Watch Homepage

Index of Exorbitant Cost Estimates Provided for Freedom of Information in British Columbia – CRD Watch Homepage

NDP Used to Care about FOI Laws—not anymore, say BC Greens

Newsroom

2026 Bill 9 Weakens Access in BC

BC Government Accused of a Stealth Attack on Freedom of Information | The Tyee

B.C. NDP no longer cares about access to information – Victoria Times Colonist

Petition · That Section 13 of British Columbia’s Freedom of Information Legislation FOIPPA be removed – Canada · Change.org

BC Housing Launched a Quasi-Judicial Attempt to Deny me Access to Information. They Failed. – CRD Watch Homepage

Content from BC Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs FOI, deemed a refusal by the OIPC, reveals that in May 2021, the BC government invited UDI lobbyists for confidential consultations about public hearings (reducing them) and delegating some local government decision-making from elected officials to staff. – CRD Watch Homepage

I made an FOI to the BC Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs regarding proposed Bill M216. The OIPC granted them a half year extension. – CRD Watch Homepage