Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Guide to FOIP, CHAPTER 5, Third Party Information. Updated 9 March 2023. 77 subsection 19(1) of FOIP and personal information the government institution intends to disclose pursuant to subsection 29(2)(o) of FOIP. Section 34 of FOIP lays out who should receive notice and what the notice should include. In Merck Frosst Canada Ltd. v. Canada (Health), 2012 SCC 3 (CanLII), [2012] 1 SCR 23, the Supreme Court of Canada summarized the requirement to provide notice and the nature of the review to be performed by the head of a government institution. In that case, the Court was considering the third party notice provision in the federal Access to Information Act (s. 27(1)) which has similar wording to section 34 of FOIP. In the court’s view, the head must conduct a sufficient review of the requested material in order to decide if the threshold for notice has been met: [84] To sum up my conclusions on s. 27(1): (i) With respect to third party information, the institutional head has equally important duties to disclose and not to disclose and must take both duties equally seriously. (ii) The institutional head: • should disclose third party information without notice only where the information is clearly subject to disclosure, that is, there is no reason to believe that it is exempt; • should refuse to disclose third party information without notice where the information is clearly exempt, that is, where there is no reason to believe that the information is subject to disclosure. (iii) The institutional head must give notice if he or she: • Is in doubt about whether the information is exempt, in other words if the case does not fall under the situations set out in point (ii); • Intends to disclose exempted material to serve the public interest pursuant to s. 20(6) [disclosure in the public interest]; or • Intends to disclose severed material pursuant to s. 25 [severability].184 Subsection 34(1)(a) 184 Merck Frosst Canada Ltd. v. Canada (Health), 2012 SCC 3 (CanLII), [2012] 1 SCR 23 at [84].
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTgwMjYzOA==