From  CAJ

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government has been selected by a trio of journalism organizations as the provincial winner of the 2025 Code of Silence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy after Alberta’s information and privacy commissioner found the province broke its own freedom of information laws.

The commissioner’s investigation into 27 public bodies was sparked by requests for reviews of access-to-information filings that the province refused, including several made by The Globe and Mail as part of its Secret Canada freedom of information project.

In a May 2025 report, Information and Privacy Commissioner Diane McLeod found that the Alberta government was improperly requiring applicants to limit access requests to a single topic, split requests covering multiple topics, restrict searches to a 12-month period and frame requests so they could be completed within 30 days.

The commissioner issued several recommendations, including that the provincial government end the non-compliant practices and establish policies and procedures to ensure public bodies meet their obligations under freedom-of-information rules.

McLeod said at the time that, although the Alberta government was planning to replace its Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the recommendations would continue to apply to provisions in the new legislation that were “the same or substantially similar.”

Alberta replaced the FOIP Act with the Access to Information Act and the Protection of Privacy Act.

Critics have said the Access to Information Act further limits what information the province may disclose and makes the province’s access-to-information process more difficult and less transparent.

Among the contested changes, the act exempts records of communications among political staff, or between ministers and political staff.

The Code of Silence Awards are presented annually by the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), the Centre for Free Expression (CFE) at Toronto Metropolitan University, and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE). The award calls public attention to government or publicly funded agencies that work hard to hide information to which the public has a right to under access-to-information legislation