Office of the Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner. Guide to LA FOIP, Chapter 4, Exemptions from the Right of Access. Updated 18 Oct 2023. 6 [2] Providing access to government information, however, also engages other public and private interests. Government, for example, collects information from third parties for regulatory purposes, information which may include trade secrets and other confidential commercial matters. Such information may be valuable to competitors and disclosing it may cause financial or other harm to the third party who had to provide it. Routine disclosure of such information might even ultimately discourage research and innovation. Thus, too single-minded a commitment to access to this sort of government information risks ignoring these interests and has the potential to inflict a lot of collateral damage. There must, therefore, be a balance between granting access to information and protecting these other interests in relation to some types of third party information. [3] The need for this balance is well illustrated by these appeals. They arise out of requests for information which had been provided to government by a manufacturer as part of the new drug approval process. In order to get approval to market new drugs, innovator pharmaceutical companies, such as the appellant Merck Frosst Canada Ltd. (“Merck”), are required to disclose a great deal of information to the government regulator, the respondent Health Canada, including a lot of material that they, with good reason, do not want to fall into their competitors’ hands. But competitors, like everyone else in Canada, are entitled to the disclosure of government information under the Access to Information Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. A-1 (“Act” or “ATI”). [4] The Act strikes a careful balance between the sometimes competing objectives of encouraging disclosure and protecting third party interests. While the Act requires government institutions to make broad disclosure of information, it also provides exemptions from disclosure for certain types of third party information, such as trade secrets or information the disclosure of which could cause economic harm to a third party. It also provides third parties with procedural protections. These appeals concern how the balance struck by the legislation between disclosure and protection of third parties should be reflected in the interpretation and administration of that legislation. Furthermore, Justice Gabrielson described the balancing act in Hande v University of Saskatchewan, (2019) as follows: [15] As can be seen, the Act attempts to strike a balance between the public’s right to access information which the Government of Saskatchewan (or a body holding delegated authority from the government) has to ensure accountability to persons affected by the information and the corresponding need to protect the privacy of individuals or other legitimate interests that may be impacted by the release of such material. It starts with the proposition that a person has access to all government records subject to limitations
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTgwMjYzOA==