Wednesday, April 18, 2018
The Toronto Star has recently been campaigning for reforms to the province’s Freedom of Information (FOI) system, claiming it is too slow and expensive and needs to be fixed. AMAPCEO has its own FOI story.
As we have reported in the past, AMAPCEO has been trying to find out how much the Ontario government relies on private sector I&IT consultants and contractors. Our previous work into the use of fee-for-service contractors in the Ministries of Health and Long-Term Care and Education revealed that using outside consultants is much more expensive than hiring OPS employees and often leads to less accountability. The previous Auditor-General made similar findings after being asked by AMAPCEO to conduct his own investigation.
On April 30, 2015, AMAPCEO used the FOI process to request a pair of reports from Treasury Board Secretariat on the government’s use of private sector I&IT contractors. One of these reports was prepared in-house by TBS, the other was prepared by Gartner, Inc., a global I&IT consulting company, for Treasury Board as a client.
On February 1, 2018—1,009 days later—AMAPCEO was granted full access to the Gartner report. That report, entitled ITS Infrastructure Tower Benchmarking: Final Results, is available here.
Initially, AMAPCEO was granted access to only a redacted version of the report that blacked out much of the information. Believing that there was no convincing rationale for this redaction, AMAPCEO appealed to the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Our submission in the FOI appeal was made in February, 2016.
On October 27, 2016, AMAPCEO learned that we had prevailed in the appeal to the IPC. That decision can be found here.
Gartner then moved to seek a judicial review of the IPC’s decision. A hearing was held on November 16, 2017. The decision in AMAPCEO’s favour was issued on December 20, 2017 and is available here.
Incredibly, following that decision it still took the Treasury Board an additional 43 days to issue the unredacted report. We are reviewing the information, which has raised other questions that may lead to further FOI requests, but are pleased in the meantime to be able to provide it in full to the AMAPCEO membership.