I would say this. With regard to Bill 29, whatever the motivation for the act as it materialized, the report that had been done prior to ours was replete with examples of senior public servants asking for exclusions and exemptions in the act, and they were put in place. The attitude was that “We have to restrict the amount of information that's available under the business interest clause because people won't do business with the province.” There was this fear that somehow the whole public enterprise that is government would collapse if people could have more information about it.
That's where the retrenchment started, and that's where the diminishment of access rights began. Our committee had five separate instances where people, representing either public agencies or agencies that had some connection with the government, asked to be excluded from the act. They had this apprehension that hugely negative things would happen if people had access to certain information. They painted a picture of what might happen, not what did happen.
There's tremendous pressure to exclude from the act various organizations and agencies. I would ask you to be aware that that's a natural tendency on the part of public agencies that will appear in front of you that may not want as much access to their information.