IP Commissioner: Region in deemed refusal re fluoridation FOI request

Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office confirms that Peel Region “appeared to” violate information legislation (Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, 1990)

[The letter of May 23, 2017 from Francesco Russo, Analyst with the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario’s office, was marked “Personal and Confidential”.]

 

Email sent to the Regional Clerk, May 24, 2017:

Dear Kathryn,

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Further to my email of May 18th, below, today I received a letter from the IPC’s office stating that they sent you a notice on April 26, 2017 indicating that the Region “appeared” to be in a deemed refusal situation for failing to properly respond to my request for the written transcript of Council’s illegally closed meeting.

Hence, your latest letter, the first in which Staff explicitly acknowledged my request for the written transcript, “appears to be” 6.5 months late.  best-job-search-advice-youre-fired.0

A simple apology would have been preferred to your insinuations that I have been making baseless complaints.

I will most certainly be appealing further to the IPC regarding Staff’s handling of this matter and your withholding of many sections of the transcript that do not contain personal information.  This will be in addition to my appeal regarding your withholding of the entire audio recording for no legitimate reason.

Best wishes,
Christine Massey

***

On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 4:29 PM, Christine Massey <cmssyc@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Kathryn,

This is in regards to the second “Final Decision” letter you sent to my home today, dated May 15, 2017, file number I23-16-317 (the file number for my request under MFIPPA for the audio recording of Council’s illegally closed meeting of January 2016 which Staff to this day has never provided me).

You first “Final Decision” letter was dated Nov. 29, 2016.  I have no idea what the purpose of this new letter is – aside from putting something on the public record that implies that I have been making “frivolous” requests and appeals when in fact I have not – given that it tells me nothing I didn’t already know.

In this letter you discuss the many letters that Staff sent me in the past under file number I23-16-317.  You also discuss my separate request under MFIPPA, made on October 3, 2016, for the written transcript, which Staff never acknowledged to me until they finally mentioned it in an email 59 days after I submitted that request.  In this email, for the very first time, Staff advised me that they had, for some unstated reason and against my wishes, unilaterally combined my audio and transcript FOI requests into one request. That email did not fulfill the Region’s obligation under section 19 of MFIPPA[NOTE: the email did not explicitly acknowledge the request, only hinted at it, stating that the audio and transcript were being processed together… no mention of my actual request for the transcript.]

In your new letter, you remind me that in many previous letters (file number I23-16-317) Staff stated that a transcript was necessary in order to fulfill the audio request.  Again, these statements did not fulfill the Region’s obligation under section 19 of MFIPPA.  Telling me the steps that Staff must take in order to fulfill my audio request is not the same as providing notice regarding my transcript request as required under MFIPPA.

Notice by head

19 Where a person requests access to a record, the head of the institution to which the request is made or if a request is forwarded or transferred under section 18, the head of the institution to which it is forwarded or transferred, shall, subject to sections 20, 21 and 45, within thirty days after the request is received,Untitled

(a) give written notice to the person who made the request as to whether or not access to the record or a part of it will be given; and

(b) if access is to be given, give the person who made the request access to the record or part, and if necessary for the purpose cause the record to be produced.  R.S.O. 1990, c. M.56, s. 19; 1996, c. 1, Sched. K, s. 15.

Prior to making my request for the transcript, I explained to you that I would be making this separate request and my reason for doing so.  At no time did you or anyone else indicate that there was any reason why I should not do that, or that I would be provided the transcript in response to my audio request.

Given the Region’s history of keeping the public in the dark regarding its harmful fluoridation of public drinking water (i.e. the Region’s cessation of reporting on proof of harm from overexposure to fluoride, aka dental fluorosis, after Dick Ito’s study showed that 1 in 3 fluoridated Peel children have fluorosis; false and misleading statements made on the Region’s website; false statements by Staff in public and in the media; the rigged and illegally closed meeting), I had no reason to assume that Staff would provide me anything that they were not legally compelled to provide me.

Never did Staff provide me any hint, let alone explicit notice, of their intent to provide me the transcript instead of the audio recording in response to my audio request.  Even if Staff had told me that, being the recipient of a bizarre earlier letter stating that many sections of the meeting had been “released” to me when in fact they had not, I would not have taken Staff at their word and would have still preferred to make a separate formal request, as was my right. Hence my separate request for the transcript, which was never properly dealt with as required under MFIPPA.  And hence my appeal to the IPC.

So again, I have no idea what the purpose of your letter is, aside from implying that the Region met its obligations under MFIPPA in regards to my transcript request, which is not the case.

 Any legitimate, transparent government would not be putting a resident to so much trouble or making so much effort to keep the public from having access to both the written transcript and the audio recording of an illegally closed meeting (or preventing the public from even asking questions as Council prevented me on March 30, 2017).

Further, I note that 1) the transcript has only been provided in heavily redacted form and still contains many serious, misleading typos despite me pointing them out to you repeatedly in recent months, and 2) you have not even responded to my emails of Jan. 31st, Feb. 28th, March 17th and May 11th, below, where I pointed out to you that the “corrected” transcript was only partially corrected and still has several serious typos that I had already pointed out.

Best wishes,

Christine Massey