{"id":1583,"date":"2016-02-01T19:15:53","date_gmt":"2016-02-01T19:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thor.ca\/\/blog\/?p=1583"},"modified":"2016-02-01T19:17:32","modified_gmt":"2016-02-01T19:17:32","slug":"federal-court-orders-partial-disclosure-of-government-policy-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/2016\/02\/federal-court-orders-partial-disclosure-of-government-policy-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal Court orders partial disclosure of government policy paper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Canadian taxpayers have a statutory right to information under the government\u2019s control, subject only to limited and specific exceptions (<em>Access to Information Act<\/em>, s. 2(1)).\u00a0 One such exception is for information protected by solicitor-client privilege.\u00a0\u00a0 In <a href=\"http:\/\/thor.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/2016-FC-36.pdf\"><em>The Information Commissioner of Canada v. The Minister of Employment of Social Development<\/em><\/a>, 2016 FC 36, it took a Nova Scotia lawyer \u2013 through the Information Commissioner \u2013 ten years to obtain limited parts of a government discussion paper.\u00a0 The government steadfastly argued that the paper reflected privileged legal advice from the Department of Justice (DOJ).\u00a0 Ultimately, the Federal Court found that certain portions of the paper were <em>not<\/em> privileged: they merely contained policy advice, and did not reveal any privileged advice or \u201cprovide clues\u201d about such advice (see paragraph 32).\u00a0 However, the court also found that certain other parts <em>were<\/em> protected by privilege because they stemmed from DOJ opinions and would provide clues about those privileged communications.\u00a0 The disclosure of these latter parts would therefore \u201c\u2026undercut the purposes served by solicitor-client privilege\u201d (see paragraph 30).\u00a0 The case provides a decent summary of when solicitor-client privilege arises (see paragraphs 25 to 27), which of course can arise in many corporate tax contexts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Canadian taxpayers have a statutory right to information under the government\u2019s control, subject only to limited and specific exceptions (<em>Access to Information Act<\/em>, s. 2(1)).\u00a0 One such exception is for information protected by solicitor-client privilege.\u00a0\u00a0 In <a href=\"http:\/\/thor.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/2016-FC-36.pdf\"><em>The Information Commissioner<\/em><\/a>&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corporate-tax"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}