Sometimes, when I file a freedom of information request, my heart flutters as I hit that send button.
It’s a nerdy thing to get excited about, I know. But in special cases, like when I wrote a request earlier this year for records about Ontario’s Greenbelt, I just know things are going to get spicy.
I’m Emma McIntosh, an Ontario reporter for The Narwhal. This week, I’m taking you behind the scenes of my push to obtain documents we now know as the Greenbelt Files — a Narwhal scoop that prompted Premier Doug Ford to describe the two-million-acre protected area as “a big scam.”
Ever since the Ontario government announced plans last November to cut into the Greenbelt for housing construction, I’ve been trying to understand how such a significant decision materialized.
Ford and the minister responsible for the Greenbelt, Steve Clark, have said the land removed from the protected area was picked by public servants. They’ve said politicians only found out about the plan days before the public.
But that doesn’t answer all my questions, including some raised by an investigation I worked on with the Toronto Star. For example, what prompted the province to remove protections from so many parcels of land owned by well-connected developers? So I turned to freedom of information. At first, the government denied us access to the Greenbelt Files. But after I filed a second request about my first request — a little bit of FOI-ception, stick with me here — we got something.
The documents were heavily redacted, but they did show senior staff in the premier’s office emailed about changes involving the Greenbelt months before that public timeline. They also showed a staffer breached my privacy while processing the first request: asking others how to respond to a request from The Narwhal, even though all details about who filed a request are meant to be kept confidential. And they showed that the digital folder where staffers were sending info about the request was called the Greenbelt Files, a name too good not to use in my story.
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