Twenty Months, Six FOI Requests, Nearly $1,800: What It Has Cost to Ask the City for Public Records
Owen Sound Current filed six MFIPPA requests with the City of Owen Sound over 20 months. One was completed on time. Council was informed weeks ago and has not responded.
EDITORIAL OPINION
Between October 2024 and March 2026, the Owen Sound Current filed six access requests with the City of Owen Sound under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Five received access decisions. Just one was completed within the statutory 30-day deadline; the others took 74, 84, 100, and 109 days.
A sixth request, on Vision 2050 communications between City staff and their consultant, closed without disclosure after the City issued a $7,587.50 fee estimate and a 204-day time extension on a six-month email request. The Deputy Clerk acknowledged in writing at the time that the volume of records driving that estimate reflected the limits of the City's keyword search, not the scope of what we asked for. Our fee waiver application was denied. The file was closed.
The statutory deadline under MFIPPA is 30 days for completion. Under MFIPPA, a request is “completed” when the institution issues a decision letter — grant, denial, or partial grant. It does not mean records are received. Records production can be delayed by additional statutory processes, including affected-party appeals, but the 30-day clock ends when the decision is sent.
The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario reports that municipal institutions across the province completed 82% of access requests within that window in 2024.
Just one of six files Owen Sound Current has opened with the City of Owen Sound had a decision letter issued within the 30-day statutory window.
What we sent to Council
On June 11, 2026, this publication wrote to Mayor Ian Boddy and Owen Sound City Council. The letter laid out the pattern across six files. We compared the timelines we’ve documented to provincial averages.
We also identified specific procedural choices — fee estimates issued at the upper end of the regulatory range, section 20 extensions applied at the fee-estimate stage, section 21 third-party notifications initiated late in the process — that recur across files.
We noted that two of the six requests sought communications between the City and BG Wealth Group, a real estate investment firm under investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission for suspected fraud.
The first of those requests was filed January 13, 2025. Seventeen months, multiple IPC appeals, and a new request later, this publication has not received a single substantive City–BG Wealth communication through either request.
This is despite documented interactions during the relevant period, including a 2022 municipal land transfer, taxpayer-funded facade grants, property tax arrears across five downtown properties, and a promotional video for BG Wealth featuring a City employee.
Our letter to council was for their information only. We did not ask for a response, did not request an agenda item, and did not seek a meeting. We did invite any member of council who wished to discuss the material to make contact.
No member of council has done so.
Council’s silence is a choice
Councils receive correspondence they don’t like all the time. The convention elsewhere is that a councillor who disagrees with the framing writes back and says so. A councillor who wants more information asks for it. A councillor who thinks the letter is unfair says that, too.
Silence is the exception, not the norm.
The silence in this case is notable for a second reason: Owen Sound Council is not without tools.
A councillor concerned about the City’s MFIPPA culture can request a staff report.
A councillor can put a motion on the floor.
A councillor can ask, in open session, whether the pattern described in the June letter is accurate — and if so, what the City proposes to do about it.
None of that has happened.
The default institutional answer, when questions like these are raised, is that the access coordinator applies the Act as written and that timelines reflect the complexity of the requests. There is truth in that, and there is also a limit to it.
The boil water advisory file, decided in 74 days across multiple departments without a section 20 extension, demonstrates that the City can process complex, multi-department requests within reasonable timelines when it chooses to. We filed that request on March 16, 2026 — the day the precautionary boil water advisory was lifted. The City granted partial access on May 29.
We continue to wait for notification that the appeal period has expired, and to receive records.
The most recent BG Wealth file, FOI 2026-012, was decided May 19, 2026. On June 30, the Information and Privacy Coordinator advised the Current that an affected party has filed an appeal with the Information and Privacy Commissioner. That appeal blocks release of the full file — 1,178 pages the City had proposed to release — until the appeal resolves. Records the City agreed to release more than seven weeks ago remain in the City’s hands.
What the public pays for this
To date, the Owen Sound Current has paid approximately $1,702 in MFIPPA fees to the City of Owen Sound and $50 in Information and Privacy Commissioner appeal fees. We have spent hundreds of hours on the paperwork and phone calls.
Three IPC appeal files have been opened. One was resolved in this publication’s favour when the third-party appellant withdrew. One closed on procedural grounds on June 4. One remains open.
This publication is reader-funded, ad-free, and locally owned. The costs of pursuing access to municipal records — records that belong to the public, held in trust by a government acting on the public’s behalf — fall on our readers.
Supporting this work is a decision our readers have made, and we are grateful for it — though it is not a decision that should have been necessary in the first place.
What we’re not saying
We are not saying that any individual City employee has acted in bad faith. The access coordinator on all six files has been unfailingly professional in correspondence.
Decisions about how fee estimates are scoped, how extensions are applied, and how third-party notification is timed are institutional decisions. They reflect institutional posture. They are, properly, council’s concern.
We are not saying the City has broken the law. Every choice in the pattern we have documented is permitted somewhere in the Act. What we are saying is that a municipality that consistently uses the outer edges of what is permitted, on files that touch financial relationships, contractor performance, or staff conduct — while processing routine operational requests promptly — is telling the public something about its priorities.
We are not saying the records the City has released tell us nothing. FOI 2024-052, decided in 28 days, disclosed BG Wealth’s property tax arrears in full. That file did the work it was supposed to do. The others have done less.
Transparency is a choice
An access request exists because the public asked to see something the government did not proactively release. Every one of the requests documented above began with a decision by City staff or council to keep a record from public view until it was compelled, through the formal MFIPPA process and its attendant fees and delays, to release it.
Those upstream decisions have received far less scrutiny than the downstream MFIPPA process, and they deserve more.
Consider Vision 2050.
When Owen Sound residents completed a taxpayer-funded community survey to inform the City’s strategic plan, the survey drew roughly 5,000 open-ended responses from members of the public who offered their views in good faith. The City then made a decision — without council direction, without bylaw change, and without informing survey respondents in advance — that raw survey data would not be released.
That decision reversed the practice used with previous City surveys, whose raw data had been published.
Owen Sound Current then filed FOI 2024-073 to obtain the results. The City charged us $517.50 and took 100 days to complete the request on data collected from the public, at public expense, that had been made confidential by staff choice.
Consider BG Wealth.
None of the underlying communications between the City and the developer were proactively disclosed. We've spent seventeen months, filed multiple appeals, and paid $855 in fees trying to obtain what a reasonable person can see must exist.
Consider the boil water advisory.
The City issued a precautionary boil water advisory on March 14, 2026, and we are not aware of a previous boil water advisory of this scope in the City in recent memory. Owen Sound sits in the region shaped by the 2000 Walkerton water tragedy in neighbouring Bruce county, where seven residents died from E. coli contamination. Water safety is a matter of concrete public interest in this part of Ontario.
The public was told the advisory was linked to infrastructure upgrades. We filed FOI 2026-033 the day the advisory was lifted, seeking the underlying operational, regulatory, and communications records — records that would explain what actually happened, why, and how it was communicated.
The City took 74 days to decide. Records remain undisclosed. The public still has not seen what the City knew, when it knew it, and what it chose to say.
Transparency is not the natural state of municipal government. It is a choice made every day, in dozens of decisions large and small about what to publish and what to withhold.
When a municipality chooses to withhold, the burden of extraction falls on residents, journalists, and other members of the public willing to pursue the process. That process — as this publication has now documented at length — is neither fast, nor cheap, nor guaranteed to produce the records the public seeks.
The MFIPPA process is the response to a lack of transparency, not a substitute for it. A City committed to transparency does not put its residents through this in the first place.
What City Council’s silence tells us
Our June 11 letter was a courtesy. It was written on the understanding that council would rather hear about a pattern from us in advance than read about it in the pages of this publication. Council has had over three weeks to acknowledge the letter, to disagree with it, to ask questions, or to publicly commit to examining the questions it raised.
Instead, council has said nothing.
Members of council are entitled to that choice. The public is also entitled to understand what it means.
Access to municipal records is not a courtesy the City extends to those who ask politely. It is a right the public holds, exercised through the journalists, residents, lawyers, and researchers who file requests on the public’s behalf.
When elected representatives are given specific, documented evidence that a pattern of institutional conduct has cost a local news publication twenty months and nearly $1,800 in pursuit of records the public has an obvious interest in seeing, and elected representatives say nothing, the reasonable inference is that they find the pattern acceptable.
We cannot draw any other conclusion. A council that accepts a pattern making public records harder, slower, and more expensive to obtain — on files touching financial relationships with a firm under investigation for suspected fraud, contractor performance on a $200,000 strategic planning project, and how City leadership communicated during a boil water advisory — has accepted a narrower standard of public accountability than the residents of this city are entitled to.
We are not asking Council to intervene in staff decisions on any individual file. Councillors correctly do not direct staff on how to handle a specific access request, a specific bylaw complaint, or a specific enforcement action. That principle is important and we respect it.
Council does not need to intervene in any file to ask whether the systems it oversees — the fee estimates staff issue, the extensions staff apply, the bylaws staff enforce, the FOI process staff administer — are working the way they are intended.
That question is not interference. That is oversight, and it is precisely what elected representatives are for.
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