Thursday, April 17th, 2008 ::: City Hall: Other
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“The position the City took (in opposing the FOI request) is outrageous ,” said Councillor Moscoe after reading the IPC ruling.

-Spacing Wire

Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner has ruled [PDF] in favour of IllegalSigns.ca and has restored our access to the Freedom of Information system.

We have been unable to file a Freedom of Information request since late 2006; disturbingly, it now appears that the City Clerk barred us from the FOI system because we use this web site to criticize city staff for their maladministration of billboard regulations.

The FOI-driven research conducted by this website into illegal billboards has caused massive changes in the way this city looks. We have caused the removal of over 100 billboards; enforcement action against an additional 250; a $1 Million budget allocation to write a new signs by-law; and it has caused the City to be sued by the advertising industry. Yet City Clerk Ulli Watkiss, in January 2007, wrote us this letter, informing us that she considered our FOIs “frivolous and vexatious.”

The disturbing part happened next. After we appealed her decision, Watkiss’s department printed out pages of this website’s Audits of By-Law Enforcement section and submitted them to the IPC, claiming that we should be denied access to the FOI system because we portray City staff in a negative light; her department also argued that we should be denied access because we used the FOI process to advocate for a new signs by-law.

The Clerk’s reasoning was entirely rejected by the IPC. No wonder. Her reasoning is dangerous and anti-democratic. Watkiss’ attack on this web site represents a culpable rejection of prevailing standards of conduct for municipal clerks in free and democratic societies. Watkiss should resign because she used the power of her position to deny access to public documents in order to protect the bureaucracy from criticism on the internet.

It should be noted that we filed 625 FOIs, and over 500 of them were processed by the Clerk’s Department without problem. It was only after this web site went online, and after we used FOI documents to tell people about the bungling of the City’s by-law enforcement against billboards, that the City Clerk decided that our requests were “frivolous and vexatious.”

Read the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s decision.

Here are some highlights of the decision:

• “… to find that a request is “for a purpose other than to obtain access” and thus “frivolous or vexatious” on the basis that the requester may use the information to oppose actions taken by an institution would be completely contrary to the spirit of the Act, which exists in part as an accountability mechanism in relation to government organizations.” Page 17. Para. 2.
• “The City submits that it believes that the appellant is filing the requests for the purpose of obtaining a policy change with respect to the City’s sign by-laws and enforcement procedures for illegal billboards. ” Page 9, Para, 4.
• “The City’s submissions appear to suggest that it believes the appellant is submitting a large number of complicated requests for the purpose of gathering information to portray the City in a negative light on his web site.” Page 14, Para. 4.
• “Contrary to the City’s suggestions, I find that the appellant’s behaviour supports his position that he seeks access to the information he requests for reasonable and legitimate grounds; specifically, to review the legality of billboards posted around the City. The fact that he subsequently used the information to file complaints about illegal billboards or to support his view that signage by-laws and enforcement procedures should be revised, does not alter the fact that his purpose for filing he requests is to gain access to the requested information.” Page 10, Para. 4
• “In my view… the requests made by the appellant were made for a genuine purpose. The appellant is involved in an organization that investigates whether certain billboards posted in the City are illegal. Only by examining City records obtained through access to information procedures can the appellant determine whether or not a billboard is illegal and, if so, subsequently file a legitimate complaint. I cannot agree that the appellant’s reasons for seeking access to the information he requests or the uses to which he puts that information once he receives it are either illegitimate or dishonest, however disadvantageous they may appear to the City. “ Page 16, Para. 2.
• “I do not accept that, based on the type of information sought, it is a particularly onerous or complicated task for the City to locate the responsive records.” Page 13, Para 6

Below, is part of the disturbing submission that the City made to the IPC. The City quotes from our blog posts Audit: 298 Queen Street West (where Officer Bartolo screwed up) and Audit: CBS Roof Sign, 533 Manning Avenue, At Harbord (where Officer Danny Baird neglected to read the plan). Unbelievably, the City whited-out key portions of their submission to the IPC when giving us a copy, and we only learned the true nature of the City Clerk’s arguments after the IPC rendered its decision:

We can only discern the whited-out portions of that document from the IPC’s decision. They apparently say something like “portray the city in a bad light,” and “advocate for a new signs by-law.”

In addition to Audit: 298 Queen Street West and Audit: CBS Roof Sign, 533 Manning Avenue, At Harbord, the Clerk’s Department also submitted photocopies of the following three blog posts to show evidence of why we should be prevented from filing FOIs: Audit: 193 Spadina Ave, Audit: 90 Harbour Street, 21 Bathurst Street, Illegal LCD Screen Installation in Progress.