Dean Beeby is a World Press Freedom Canada board member and author of the Substack newsletter, “Journalism, Transparency, and the Art of FOI.”

Investigative journalists know that internal government emails, texts and other so-called ephemeral or transitory records can be smoking guns, exposing scandals lurking underneath the official version of events.

There are plenty of examples of stories broken through emails obtained under freedom-of-information laws, not least Ontario’s Greenbelt scandal, in which the Ford government cozied up to developers.

Even more telling are cases in which public servants tried to make their emails disappear by double- and triple-deleting inboxes and outboxes to hide evidence of malfeasance from nosy reporters using FOI laws.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that the federal government wants to make all its internal emails and texts unavailable for requests made under the Access to Information Act.

“This would mean that what institutions search for and retrieve in response to an ATI request are records that have ongoing business value and that are stored in official repositories, which would effectively remove transitory records from the scope of the Act,” says a government discussion paper from March.

The paper proposes two categories of federal records. One, rubber-stamped and sanitized official documents; and two, messy transitory documents – such as emails – that often reveal behind-the-scenes decision-making.

The government claims the change would speed up processing of access-to-information requests. With fewer records to locate and review, workloads could be pared back in ATI units.

But the claim is specious. While responses to access-to-info requests might be more timely, they would also be loaded with government-sanctioned drivel. The good stuff would be off-limits. Government misconduct would be safely hidden.

The discussion paper advocates other proposals that would increase government secrecy, including a measure to handcuff the information commissioner’s investigations; a proposal to blackball some requesters as “vexatious;” and suspension of the access law during emergencies, such as pandemics.

Journalists have been pushing back, opposing the measures at summer roundtables convened by Treasury Board, and through written briefs (which the government has chosen not to make public.) Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard has also opposed the changes. Lawyers have raised a hue and cry.

But with a news landscape flooded with trade and sovereignty issues, these damaging ATI proposals may yet slip into law without scrutiny. Treasury Board is expected to report to Parliament on its review of the Act in the coming months. It may be the last opportunity for journalists and others to speak out against the twilighting of transparency.