The Freedom of Information requests made by me and by Elsa Lam, Editor of Canadian Architect, for a Powerpoint deck that could shed light on the Ford Government’s decision to move the Ontario Science Centre to Ontario Place were rejected. We received word from the Ministry of Infrastructure earlier this week. In their words, “the record will be withheld in full.” In other words, we got nothing.

Four exemptions to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) were cited: the deck is considered a record prepared to brief a minister, the deck constitutes advice to the government, the deck contains information relating to economic or other interests of a government institution, and the deck deals with labour relations issues. With so many exemptions cited, it seems very unlikely that an appeal would succeed.

Why This Matters and What to Do

The Ford Government’s decision to destroy the Ontario Science Centre – a beloved institution in an iconic building – and replace with an inferior component of a bright shiny object – Ontario Place – is opposed by all three opposition parties, many in the media, citizen’s groups, and over 70 percent of residents of the GTHA. Nonetheless, Doug Ford doubled on his plan in the party leaders’ debate earlier this week.

Ms. Lam and I both felt that the information contained in the Powerpoint deck would shed light on the reasons for the Government’s decision and hence provide better information for voters. The rejection of our request means that that information will certainly not be available before the election and probably not in the foreseeable future. In our view, the considerable information the Government has previously released does not support its decision. If closing the Science Centre is an issue that matters to you – and 95,000 people have signed a petition opposing it – then vote against the Ford Government. We both will.

Reflecting on the Process

Ms. Lam and I learned of the existence of this Powerpoint deck only because one page of it was included as the last of 333 pages of appendices to the Government’s “Ontario Science Centre Modernization Business Case.” We requested the entire deck because we thought it would explain the government’s decision-making process. The page that was included in the business case is an estimate of the cost of renting space for, and operating, a temporary science centre between the closing of the Don Mills location and the opening of the new location at Ontario Place. Ms. Lam wrote a blog post critiquing the analysis on that page, and I recommend reading her post.

The page in the Business Case listing the appendices cryptically referred to this deck as a “CCT Presentation to MO on January 26, 2023.” Our interest was piqued by the date, which shows that by early 2023 the Government was already considering closing the Don Mills location in the near future, a full 18 months before it suddenly pulled the plug because of fears the roof would collapse. I should note that Toronto has just had massive snowfalls and the roof hasn’t collapsed.

 In an online search I found that CCT stands for the Central Coordination Table in Cabinet Office. This was not on any Ontario Government website, but on the LinkedIn page of someone who worked there. FoI staff told me that the MO stands for Minister’s Office. I was alerted that the deck might be considered a Cabinet record or advice to a minister.

Processing = Redacting

As discussed in a previous post about this FoI request, when I contacted FoI staff in the Ministry of Infrastructure during the fall, they said they were “processing the file.” It turns out that they were processing the file for almost five months, between late last September and now. If “processing” denotes some activity, what were they doing? The best answer I can come up with is that, given all the exemptions to FIPPA that they were applying to the deck, they were slowly redacting it. And by the time they had finished redacting the deck, there was virtually nothing left. At that point, the decision was made to “withhold the record in full.”

Who Decides

The FIPPA Act requires the government to provide the name of the person who made the decision. In this case, it was Sean Keelor, who is the Ministry of Infrastructure’s CAO in private sector parlance, or Assistant Deputy Minister for Corporate Services, in public sector parlance. We will never know whether Mr. Keelor made the decision on his own initiative, or whether he consulted upward with the Deputy Minister or the Minister’s Office.

When I posted my blog about the request a few weeks ago, I sent it to the public servants I dealt with and wrote “[Elsa and I] see no reason that [dealing with the request] cannot be done during the caretaker period, since it is the routine work of government.” I considered this wishful thinking, and assumed it was extremely unlikely I would hear from the government while the election campaign was ongoing. I was somewhat surprised to receive this negative response now; the most risk-averse course of action, from a political point of view, would have been to wait until after the election campaign.

At the End of the Day

Someone in the Ford Government took a page from a document and made it public when it suited their purpose, which was to indicate that the government had considered the option of a temporary science centre sufficiently seriously that it had been costed out. But that government used exemptions to FIPPA to prevent releasing the rest of the document. Presumably the public knowing what was in the rest of the document didn’t suit their purposes. As I wrote in my previous post “Franz Kafka would not be surprised.” Despite this lacuna, there is plenty of information in the public domain to support a judgment that moving the Science Centre to Ontario Place is fundamentally misguided. And that’s one of the reasons why I will be voting in the advance poll today for Stephanie Bowman, the incumbent MPP for Don Valley West, who has been a strong opponent of this misguided decision.