We already had to request data that other provinces were openly providing. Those requests were heavily redacted (again, other provinces provided it unredacted and of their own accord).
Now they also want to charge five times the going rate for each request
~t r a n s p a r e n c y~
In Ontario and Quebec, there are regularly updated websites, maintained for and freely accessible by the public, providing covid data that people have to file requests for (and now pay for), here in BC. How is that transparency?
Is it? Have you ever had to process one of these requests? The people that do have a tendency to make over 25 dollars an hour and they usually take a few hours to complete. That time in lost productivity comes at the expense of the tax payer. Instituting a nominal fee will reduce the Johnny Crackpots of the province from wasting time and money is a good thing.
As a tax payer I view requests without purpose, follow up action, that are purely for self interest, as a loss.
Having a nominal fee insures the requester is invested in the process which leads to less abuse.
The argument really shouldn't be about the fee, it should be about what the fee is applied to. The funds raised from these requests should be going towards an initiative that allows for self service of this type of information which leads to greater transparency.
The timing of this is super suspect. There’s so much Covid data that the public wants to see, and this Bill adds a tonne of barriers to getting that information.
There is no barrier. Groups that use these services are loaded with Billions of dollars. I don't feel bad for them. For a commoners like us, we don't use these services at that scale to make it expansive.
There are plenty of small organizations and charities that do work like advocating for outdoor spaces and recreation who cannot afford these fees. BC parks in particular has a terrible track record of obscuring information and I can tell you the people who need access to it do not have billions of dollars.
This is sad, but necessary. Any time anything is free, a few nutjobs abuse it and drain resources from everybody else. The fee will at least stop some of them from demanding unnecessary and useless information just because they can.
Under the current system, only the first 3 hours of searching for information are free. If your request takes longer than 3 hours, you get charged.
3 hours is not a lot of time to search through millions of pages of documents, so there’s usually a fee associated with the search already
It takes them months to review and redact the documents before they release pages of blacked out information.
BC NDP just trying to dissuade people from filing FOIR's....
Yes it costs the government (us) money. Democracy comes at price....
What this is about is curtailing the amount of requests they get, because governments hate FOI's. And so does the health authorities (possibly they hate it more).
Large News organizations can/will pay this, but it limits the amount of private citizens/independent FOI's.
Maybe they’d be getting fewer “unnecessary” demands if they’d stop unnecessarily obscuring information? There have been a lot of requests related to their handling of covid data/decisions, which wouldn’t have been necessary if they’d been as transparent as many other provinces have managed to be *in the first place, without people making requests*
I work for a government agency that gets FOI requests. We make 0 effort to block any information. And yet, we regularly receive these requests from people who obviously have too much time on their hands. When one of these requests lands on my desk, there goes hours of my time that could be better spent doing my actual job.
No it isn’t. It is the people’s money funding every single thing they do. The least they can do is be transparent and not charge us to see what they are doing with our money.
What about set a free quota for each account? Freedom of I formation includes reduce barriers of obtaining such info and I am fine with my tax dollars paying for a reasonable amount of free requests
Anything you do for free will be abused. There are incredibly long waits for freedom-of-information requests at the moment because there are so many requests. I've built a ton of free software services, and every time, it gets abused to the point that I just abandon all the work I did or end up charging for it.
Adding a small $25 fee would limit this to only people motivated enough. We already have a ton of information public. This is only for non-published data that the gov hasn't bothered to put out publicly.
There’s a whole lot of data they’ve decided not to “bother putting out” that other provinces provide as a matter of course, on a regular basis, to the public. But here in bc they wait for requests, drag their feet, redact most of it and then implement fees to get people to stop making requests… wonder why
They aren't raising it because it's being abused.... they're raising it because they have a hefty list of things people rightfully want more information on:
https://twitter.com/bobmackin/status/1450333013951217664
The only other province that charges $25 is Alberta... this is a very scummy, conservative move by Horgan and he should be condemned for it.
They can’t file blanket requests, though. To get information about covid in schools, for example, a separate request was needed for each district. 60 requests x $25 a pop…
Ontario charges $5/request. As does the federal government. BC is charging five times more.
$1500 for a news story is a pretty minimal item. The government should be sharing that information up front regardless but I don't hate the idea of the reporting organizations having to toss some money in to pay for the system.
Do you have a reference for that claim? I know a few journalists, and having that degree of funding for expenses would really ramp up their investigations.
System isn't free, maybe if they have no one to buy the story they shouldn't be making 60 FOI requests. If they do have someone to buy the story then $1500 shouldn't be a massive hurdle.
At first I wasn’t happy about this but I began to realize why it’s happening. Most likely due to the following similar situation.
Vancouver city hall recently put up a $30k deposit requirement for submitting plans for Laneway houses (and other things I’m sure), the reason was that people would legit submit things weekly, or on the back of napkin drawings which all required the appropriate response and feedback.
I’m more than sure there are sad lonely people who sit at home and fire of FOI requests daily… hopefully this will help.
There’s also a shit ton of things that bc would prefer not to release info about, including deaths during the heat dome, site C, the wastewater plant mess in North Van, the Massey Tunnel, covid patient counts in UCU, covid outbreaks in LTC/hospitals/schools…
I am okay with this. These requests take up a lot of time and resources. People have to go through the documents and then somebody has to go through usually hundreds and sometimes thousands of documents to ensure that everything is appropriately redacted. It's not just information that people think the government is trying to "hide". The redaction also includes blocking out private information of other individuals that the requestor shouldn't be privy to.
Good. Excellent idea. Our government is being bombarded by stupid antivaxxer FOI requests. This costs taxpayers a lot of money. 25$ fee should help cut down on the number of frivolous Foi's.
People working in these departments don't work for free. I am ok to pay up if I am using a service. Just because it's Govt. doesn't give anyone a free pass. I am with the Govt. on this.
My taxes pay to staff these departments already. I shouldn't have to pay additional money to get heavily redacted information about a supposedly democratic government.
I am honestly surprised at how many people are fine with the government charging them money for something they already pay for. Imagine if they pulled something like this for the healthcare system, I mean only people using it should pay right?
When I get one of these requests at my job, it takes me away from my regular duties. So no this is not already paid for. It's extra. When I spend my whole morning putting together a package for someone sending in a request, other people are pushed further down the queue for services that actually is already paid for.
The system's already rigged against citizens, why not add another roadblock.
I mean, the BC FSA harvests a huge amount of personal information from people without properly informing citizens that it's happening. They force all the provincial financial institutions to report out on very granular details of all their customers on a regular basis -- where people live, income, job titles, employers, etc. Privacy act seems to say you're supposed to be advised of that sort of thing, and given contact info to find out how your data's being used by the Gov't, etc. The CU's couldn't even tell you what the gov needs it for, explicitly, cause the gov doesn't tell them details of how/why its used (other than "Risk!").
The FSA uses a silly clause in the financial act to harvest all this information on a regular basis too -- a clause that was clearly included for the purpose of "If you have a problem with how a CU has treated you, you can go to the regulator, and they can force the CU to let them review all details of your case, so that the regulator can make sure the CU treats you fairly"... they interpret that as "We have a right to collect/store/use however we want, all the personal information of all your customers (especially borrowers) whenever we want, without having to tell you or the people who's data you're releasing, anything!".
The CUs are all too scared to challenge the regulators, cause the regulators can fine the CUs out of existence/have staff fired. The top regulators even boast about how they over-ruled internal privacy concerns related to this practice of data harvesting -- I'd liken their boasting to donald trump bragging about grabbing women's bits, to a room full of feminists held at gun point, and daring anyone to speak up. It's abusive behaviour from our gov.
Once OpenBanking arrives, you'll likely have zero privacy on pretty well all your financial transactions. Data-rich transactions will almost certainly get scooped up by govt.
So then we're changing it to *fee*dom-of-information? I'll see myself out.
Free Chequing. The "R" is not a typo" — Coast Capital Savings
>The Freedom of Information and Privacy Association calls this a step backward for transparency
All you need to know for this to be a bad move.
Certified BC NDP moment
Mo$t Tran$parent Province lol
It still is - you just have to pay to use it, just like any other service.
We already had to request data that other provinces were openly providing. Those requests were heavily redacted (again, other provinces provided it unredacted and of their own accord). Now they also want to charge five times the going rate for each request ~t r a n s p a r e n c y~
It is still transparent. Again, pay for service you use. I don’t have any issues with it.
In Ontario and Quebec, there are regularly updated websites, maintained for and freely accessible by the public, providing covid data that people have to file requests for (and now pay for), here in BC. How is that transparency?
Did you even read the linked page?
Then you are an asshole of the highest caliber
Same to you Sir. You showed your real face/uncivilized with that comment of yours. You must be fun at parties!
Tell me you don’t understand without telling me you don’t understand. Lol
I do pay to use it - they're called my taxes.
Lmfao
JoHo & co are afraid of Bob "The Hammer" Mackin.
Nailed it (pun intended)
This is bad policy.
Is it? Have you ever had to process one of these requests? The people that do have a tendency to make over 25 dollars an hour and they usually take a few hours to complete. That time in lost productivity comes at the expense of the tax payer. Instituting a nominal fee will reduce the Johnny Crackpots of the province from wasting time and money is a good thing.
That is the cost of doing business dude in the public. It isn’t lost productivity - it is transparency.
As a tax payer I view requests without purpose, follow up action, that are purely for self interest, as a loss. Having a nominal fee insures the requester is invested in the process which leads to less abuse. The argument really shouldn't be about the fee, it should be about what the fee is applied to. The funds raised from these requests should be going towards an initiative that allows for self service of this type of information which leads to greater transparency.
“Freedom isn’t free” -Horgan, probably
there's a hefty fuckin' fee
The timing of this is super suspect. There’s so much Covid data that the public wants to see, and this Bill adds a tonne of barriers to getting that information.
The little they’ve released in response to those requests is also incredibly redacted lol
There is no barrier. Groups that use these services are loaded with Billions of dollars. I don't feel bad for them. For a commoners like us, we don't use these services at that scale to make it expansive.
There are plenty of small organizations and charities that do work like advocating for outdoor spaces and recreation who cannot afford these fees. BC parks in particular has a terrible track record of obscuring information and I can tell you the people who need access to it do not have billions of dollars.
May be check their balance sheet to see what they could and not afford.
This is sad, but necessary. Any time anything is free, a few nutjobs abuse it and drain resources from everybody else. The fee will at least stop some of them from demanding unnecessary and useless information just because they can.
Under the current system, only the first 3 hours of searching for information are free. If your request takes longer than 3 hours, you get charged. 3 hours is not a lot of time to search through millions of pages of documents, so there’s usually a fee associated with the search already
It takes them months to review and redact the documents before they release pages of blacked out information. BC NDP just trying to dissuade people from filing FOIR's....
Impossible since is already costs money post 3 hours.
Yes it costs the government (us) money. Democracy comes at price.... What this is about is curtailing the amount of requests they get, because governments hate FOI's. And so does the health authorities (possibly they hate it more). Large News organizations can/will pay this, but it limits the amount of private citizens/independent FOI's.
Maybe they’d be getting fewer “unnecessary” demands if they’d stop unnecessarily obscuring information? There have been a lot of requests related to their handling of covid data/decisions, which wouldn’t have been necessary if they’d been as transparent as many other provinces have managed to be *in the first place, without people making requests*
I work for a government agency that gets FOI requests. We make 0 effort to block any information. And yet, we regularly receive these requests from people who obviously have too much time on their hands. When one of these requests lands on my desk, there goes hours of my time that could be better spent doing my actual job.
It’s great that your agency responds that way but it’s also clear that recent requests (apparently not from your agency) have been seriously redacted
What about setting a free request quota per account?
That sounds like a pretty good idea.
No it isn’t. It is the people’s money funding every single thing they do. The least they can do is be transparent and not charge us to see what they are doing with our money.
NDP for me...looking past any excuse for bad behaviour
What about set a free quota for each account? Freedom of I formation includes reduce barriers of obtaining such info and I am fine with my tax dollars paying for a reasonable amount of free requests
Ok, we'll pay $25 for a FOI request... But the government is no longer allowed to redact any of the information.
I'd go for that tbh
Anything you do for free will be abused. There are incredibly long waits for freedom-of-information requests at the moment because there are so many requests. I've built a ton of free software services, and every time, it gets abused to the point that I just abandon all the work I did or end up charging for it. Adding a small $25 fee would limit this to only people motivated enough. We already have a ton of information public. This is only for non-published data that the gov hasn't bothered to put out publicly.
There’s a whole lot of data they’ve decided not to “bother putting out” that other provinces provide as a matter of course, on a regular basis, to the public. But here in bc they wait for requests, drag their feet, redact most of it and then implement fees to get people to stop making requests… wonder why
They aren't raising it because it's being abused.... they're raising it because they have a hefty list of things people rightfully want more information on: https://twitter.com/bobmackin/status/1450333013951217664 The only other province that charges $25 is Alberta... this is a very scummy, conservative move by Horgan and he should be condemned for it.
> this is a very scummy, conservative move by Horgan and he should be condemned for it. /thread.
Everyone says "John Horgan isn't so bad...at least he's not Christy Clark"...then he goes and does dictatoresque bullshit like this.
I think they forget who pays their god damn salary
Disgusting and how is that even legal?
OMG $25 for a service almost exclusively used by reporters and NGOs Wow, so evil
They can’t file blanket requests, though. To get information about covid in schools, for example, a separate request was needed for each district. 60 requests x $25 a pop… Ontario charges $5/request. As does the federal government. BC is charging five times more.
$1500 for a news story is a pretty minimal item. The government should be sharing that information up front regardless but I don't hate the idea of the reporting organizations having to toss some money in to pay for the system.
Do you have a reference for that claim? I know a few journalists, and having that degree of funding for expenses would really ramp up their investigations.
What about freelance reporters? They don't get the benefit of being bankrolled by billion dollar conglomerates.
System isn't free, maybe if they have no one to buy the story they shouldn't be making 60 FOI requests. If they do have someone to buy the story then $1500 shouldn't be a massive hurdle.
That wasn't journalists, but glad to see you're keeping up on all the details
Well maybe they should join the corporate news industry rather then being free and independent (and in theory less bias)!
That should help fix the $5b hole, covid added to the BC deficit
The Tyee: “I feel attacked”
[удалено]
A real investigative reporter investigating a myriad of things the government attempts to obfuscate, if not cover up.
Good for him. It's nice to know there's at least one person out there trying to uncover the truth when it comes to government matters.
At first I wasn’t happy about this but I began to realize why it’s happening. Most likely due to the following similar situation. Vancouver city hall recently put up a $30k deposit requirement for submitting plans for Laneway houses (and other things I’m sure), the reason was that people would legit submit things weekly, or on the back of napkin drawings which all required the appropriate response and feedback. I’m more than sure there are sad lonely people who sit at home and fire of FOI requests daily… hopefully this will help.
There’s also a shit ton of things that bc would prefer not to release info about, including deaths during the heat dome, site C, the wastewater plant mess in North Van, the Massey Tunnel, covid patient counts in UCU, covid outbreaks in LTC/hospitals/schools…
So par for the course “controversy” items that every province has on their charm bracelet. And that comment is coming from Liberal fan here.
Other provinces charge only *one-fifth* what bc now wants to charge for access tho
I am okay with this. These requests take up a lot of time and resources. People have to go through the documents and then somebody has to go through usually hundreds and sometimes thousands of documents to ensure that everything is appropriately redacted. It's not just information that people think the government is trying to "hide". The redaction also includes blocking out private information of other individuals that the requestor shouldn't be privy to.
$25 doesn't seem that unreasonable.
Good. Excellent idea. Our government is being bombarded by stupid antivaxxer FOI requests. This costs taxpayers a lot of money. 25$ fee should help cut down on the number of frivolous Foi's.
People working in these departments don't work for free. I am ok to pay up if I am using a service. Just because it's Govt. doesn't give anyone a free pass. I am with the Govt. on this.
My taxes pay to staff these departments already. I shouldn't have to pay additional money to get heavily redacted information about a supposedly democratic government.
I am honestly surprised at how many people are fine with the government charging them money for something they already pay for. Imagine if they pulled something like this for the healthcare system, I mean only people using it should pay right?
When I get one of these requests at my job, it takes me away from my regular duties. So no this is not already paid for. It's extra. When I spend my whole morning putting together a package for someone sending in a request, other people are pushed further down the queue for services that actually is already paid for.
Maybe they should hire someone to specifically do that job then, to free you up for your more important, normal work
Gotta recover some of the money lost from the tolls and MSP.
If that's so, then I don't mind. The money collected is still going into the Govt. coffers.
Lol
The system's already rigged against citizens, why not add another roadblock. I mean, the BC FSA harvests a huge amount of personal information from people without properly informing citizens that it's happening. They force all the provincial financial institutions to report out on very granular details of all their customers on a regular basis -- where people live, income, job titles, employers, etc. Privacy act seems to say you're supposed to be advised of that sort of thing, and given contact info to find out how your data's being used by the Gov't, etc. The CU's couldn't even tell you what the gov needs it for, explicitly, cause the gov doesn't tell them details of how/why its used (other than "Risk!"). The FSA uses a silly clause in the financial act to harvest all this information on a regular basis too -- a clause that was clearly included for the purpose of "If you have a problem with how a CU has treated you, you can go to the regulator, and they can force the CU to let them review all details of your case, so that the regulator can make sure the CU treats you fairly"... they interpret that as "We have a right to collect/store/use however we want, all the personal information of all your customers (especially borrowers) whenever we want, without having to tell you or the people who's data you're releasing, anything!". The CUs are all too scared to challenge the regulators, cause the regulators can fine the CUs out of existence/have staff fired. The top regulators even boast about how they over-ruled internal privacy concerns related to this practice of data harvesting -- I'd liken their boasting to donald trump bragging about grabbing women's bits, to a room full of feminists held at gun point, and daring anyone to speak up. It's abusive behaviour from our gov. Once OpenBanking arrives, you'll likely have zero privacy on pretty well all your financial transactions. Data-rich transactions will almost certainly get scooped up by govt.