Sault Ste. Marie Police Service recognized with national award for imposing a transparency tax on public records
The Sault Ste. Marie Police Service has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Code of Silence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy, in the law enforcement category, for its sweeping new plan to increase service fees to access documents and records.
“This is a transparency tax, plain and simple,” said Brent Jolly, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ). “This is a weaponization of fees to prevent people from gaining access to records. Public information should not be turned into a revenue stream by a publicly-funded body.”
According to the Sault Star, the fee increase will apply to all sorts of documents, ranging from court subpoenas to officers’ notes. The police board will also introduce fees for several new services, including police body-worn camera and in-car camera footage, and will charge for redactions to remove sensitive information.
Requests for information under the Municipal Freedom of Information law will incur a $15 fee for every 15 minutes of staff time. The police board said the fee increase, the first since 2011, is needed to offset increased labour costs.
“The math just doesn’t add up,” Jolly said. “The public is paying a dollar a minute for staff time to access information, but the staff accessing those records are paid less than a dollar per minute.”
The Code of Silence Awards are presented annually by the CAJ, the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University (CFE), and the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE). The awards call 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.
Previous winners in the law enforcement category include: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Toronto Police Service.
The law enforcement award completes this year’s Code of Silence Awards program. In addition to the Sault Ste. Marie Police Police, other ‘winners’ in this year’s program included Canada’s federal government for its ongoing fight with Indigenous groups seeking access to records surrounding residential schools; Doug Ford’s Ontario government; and Vancouver Coastal Health.
For further information contact: Brent Jolly, president, Canadian Association of Journalists, brent@caj.ca
