Top Secret Offshore Oil and Gas Documents to be Released
On February 1, 2006, the Freedom of Information Commissioner ordered the Ministry of Energy and Mines to release documents related to future offshore oil and gas development. The Commissioner’s decision means not only that the public will get to see these key documents, but also that the government cannot contract out of its responsibility to make documents available to the public.
The documents at issue are the draft reports of three experts hired by the Minister of Energy and Mines to report on barriers to the development of offshore oil and gas in BC. “The expert panel’s report helped form and justify the government’s policy on offshore drilling,” explains West Coast Environmental Law staff lawyer, Andrew Gage. “Drafts help us understand how the panel arrived at its conclusions and whether or not the government influenced those conclusions.”
Initially, the province refused to release even the final report prepared by the experts, which was complete by January 2002. After West Coast formally requested the report, including all drafts, a government civil servant wrote: “[The Ministry’s] plan is to wait for public release of [the] report and send it to all applicants and hope it suffices in place of drafts. If West Coast Environmental Law still wants drafts + the rest they’ll deal with it at that time – not concerned about the diminishing timelines under the Act.” Accordingly, in May 2002, the province released the final report, but all drafts have remained secret.
After negotiations for the release of the documents broke down, West Coast asked for a hearing before the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, which took place in March 2004. The Ministry argued that it had no control over drafts prepared by the experts, despite a written contract stating that it had a right to access all drafts, and therefore it did not need to release them to the public.
“The Ministry’s position would mean that any document that a consultant and the government agreed would be secret would be hidden from public view,” said Gage. “With the government outsourcing more and more to consultants, that’s a big problem.”
The Commissioner’s Office agreed: “Put another way, the Ministry argues that a public body can contract out of the Act … [I]t would be inimical to the objects of the Act for records to be immunized from the Act’s application and protections because a public body contracts for services and fails – by design or neglect, before or after the fact – to provide for any, or adequate, contractual control of records that the contractor receives or produces …”
The Ministry has promised to comply with the Commissioner’s order by May 15, and the documents, once released, will be reviewed carefully by West Coast staff. A copy of the Commission’s order may be found at
http://www.oipcbc.org/orders/2006/OrderF06-01.pdf.
— Andrew Gage
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