Office of the Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner. Guide to LA FOIP, Chapter 1, Purposes and Scope of LA FOIP. Updated 7 March 2023. 31 head over the Village’s records as it pertained to LA FOIP. Therefore, the Commissioner found that LA FOIP was paramount to The Municipalities Act in the circumstances of the case. Section 4: Existing Rights Preserved Existing rights preserved 4 This Act: (a) complements and does not replace exiting procedures for access to information or records in the possession or under the control of a local authority; (b) does not in any way limit access to the type of information or records that is normally available to the public; (c) does not limit the information otherwise available by law to a party to litigation; (d) does not affect the power of any court or tribunal to compel a witness to testify or to compel the production of documents; (e) does not prevent access to a registry operated by a local authority where access to the registry is normally allowed to the public. The equivalent section in The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP) was considered by the Court of King’s Bench for Saskatchewan in City Collection Co. v. Saskatchewan Government Insurance (1993) and General Motors Acceptance Corp. of Canada, Ltd. v. Saskatchewan Government Insurance, Sask. (1993). In the latter decision, Malone, J. determined that the clear intent of section 4 of FOIP was to ensure that information available to the public prior to FOIP would remain available after its coming into effect. In his judgement he stated as follows: [8] In my opinion, s. 4 of the Act is determinative of the issue. The clear intent of this section is to provide that information available to the public prior to the passage of the Act shall remain available after its coming into effect. To interpret this section any other way would result in a restriction on the right of the public to obtain information which it previously had access to. This surely was not the intention of the Legislature. The provisions of the Act following s. 4 must be interpreted as applying to only information which is requested by the public which was not available to it prior to the passage of the Act. It is these provisions that attempt to balance the right of privacy of individuals with the desire of the public to obtain more information concerning the operation of Government, its Crown corporations and agencies. This it does by setting out the
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