Who do you serve, actually? National transparency groups call out Vancouver Coastal Health for restricting information during the COVID-19 pandemic

May 14, 2025

Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), the public agency responsible for delivering community and acute care services to more than a quarter of B.C.’s population, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the municipal Code of Silence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy for its routine breaking of access to information laws during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a Sept. 2024 report, Michael Harvey, B.C.’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, found multiple examples of how the health authority failed to meet the province’s standards. For example, the audit found only a quarter of public requests met the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act’s 30-day response benchmark.

In almost three quarters of responses, VCH failed to comply with the Act’s time limits. This resulted in the agency sometimes extending the time limit without a valid reason or the agency applying an extension to respond even after the original time limit to respond had already passed.

About one-third of the time, the authority did not even acknowledge a request for information was received.

“Freedom of information laws cannot be treated by public authorities with contempt, especially during times of crisis,” said Brent Jolly, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ).

“The pandemic laid bare the dependent relationship between quality information and public trust in institutions. As was the case with many other institutions, VCH is a leading example of how years of government neglect towards freedom-of-information practices lead, when put under pressure, to the entire structure folding in on itself like a house of cards.”

In his report, Harvey acknowledged that while VCH was under unprecedented pressures during the pandemic, the audit also pointed to other more systemic problems. These included:

• Following a 2021 amendment to FIPPA, VCH, like other public bodies, decided to charge a $10 FOI application fee for general access requests. VCH administered this fee by only accepting payment by cheque or money order, unnecessarily exacerbating the barrier to access. The agency later changed this approach.
• VCH has a policy for routinely releasing certain records without the need for an FOI request, also known as proactive disclosure. However, contrary to this policy, there were instances where VCH processed requests for these records as an FOI request and charged the application fee, rather than pointing applicants to where the records were already publicly available. Further, some records that were already public were difficult to find online.
• VCH was particularly unresponsive to the media during this period. The average number of days it took to respond to FOI requests from the media was 116 days, peaking at 171 days in 2021/2022.

Upon completion of the audit, Harvey made eight recommendations to improve VCH’s compliance with B.C.’s FIPPA rules. These recommendations included expediting communication with individuals seeking information, and strengthening policies around records management.

This year’s Code of Silence jury also agreed to bestow a dishonourable mention to the Region of Waterloo, located in the heart of southwestern Ontario’s greenbelt. Community groups and journalists have faced an up-hill battle to get access to information from the region on a controversial mega-project that will impact local farmland.

“Local residents have been kept completely in the dark,” Jolly said. “They don’t know why this parcel of land was chosen or for what potential purpose. And when they’ve tried to use the freedom of information system to find out they’ve been met with repeated roadblocks. It’s completely Sisyphean.”

The Code of Silence Awards are presented annually by the CAJ, the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University (CFE), and the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE). The awards call public attention to government or publicly-funded agencies that work hard to hide information to which the public has a right to under access to information legislation.

Vancouver Fire Rescue Services (VFRS) was the recipient of the Code of Silence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy in the municipal category last year for charging exorbitantly high fees for access to a fire investigation report already paid for by taxpayers.

The final 2024 Code of Silence Award, for the law enforcement category, will be announced on May 28.

Our thanks to Cision for sponsoring this announcement.