Office of the Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner. Guide to FOIP, Chapter 3, Access to Records. Updated 5 May 2023. 68 one which should be approached with caution. It is not an issue of “what purpose is to be served by disclosure” so much as an issue of “whether there is any information which is reasonably being conveyed by the exercise of severance. If there are more than disconnected snippets being disclosed, the information can be considered reasonably severable.113 Furthermore, the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed the approach above in Merck Frosst Canada Ltd. v. Canada (Health), 2012 SCC 3 (CanLII), [2012] 1 SCR 23 and also suggested two types of analysis that are needed: [236] To begin, it is important to recognize that applying s. 25 is mandatory, not discretionary. The section directs that the institutional head “shall [not ‘may’] disclose any part of the record that does not contain” exempted information, provided it can reasonably be severed: see Dagg, at para. 80. Thus, the institutional head has a duty to ensure compliance with s. 25 and to undertake a severance analysis wherever information is found to be exempt from disclosure. [237] The heart of the s. 25 exercise is determining when material subject to the disclosure obligation “can reasonably be severed” from exempt material. In my view, this involves both a semantic and a cost-benefit analysis. The semantic analysis is concerned with whether what is left after excising exempted material has any meaning. If it does not, then the severance is not reasonable. As the Federal Court of Appeal put it in Blank v. Canada (Minister of the Environment), 2007 FCA 289, 368 N.R. 279, at para. 7, “those parts which are not exempt continue to be subject to disclosure if disclosure is meaningful”. The cost-benefit analysis considers whether the effort of redaction by the government institution is justified by the benefits of severing and disclosing the remaining information. Even where the severed text is not completely devoid of meaning, severance will be reasonable only if disclosure of the unexcised portions of the record would reasonably fulfill the purposes of the Act. Where severance leaves only “[d]isconnected snippets of releasable information”, disclosure of that type of information does not fulfill the purpose of the Act and severance is not reasonable: Canada (Information Commissioner) v. Canada (Solicitor General), [1988] 3 F.C. 551 (T.D.), at pp. 558-59; SNCLavalin Inc., at para. 48. As Jerome A.C.J. put it in Montana Band of Indians v. Canada (Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs), [1989] 1 F.C. 143 (T.D.): To attempt to comply with section 25 would result in the release of an entirely blacked-out document with, at most, two or three lines showing. Without the context of the rest of the statement, such information would be worthless. The effort such 113 Astrazeneca Canada Inc. v. Canada (Minister of Health), 2005 FC 189 at [104] to [105].
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