"Documents released under Alberta Freedom of Information laws confirm the United Conservative government was talking with the coal industry for years about relaxing a policy that protected the Rocky Mountains from open-pit mines.
The documents also show the province was talking about opening those landscapes to more development generally for at least seven months before letting the public in on its plans."
"Justice Kent Teskey warned the province that courts take a dim view of delay being used to neuter public attempts to understand how important decisions are made.
'The requesting parties have been practically denied access to the information they are entitled to at law and this court will not abet this conduct through the availability of judicial review,' he wrote in a judgment released Friday."
💬 "In March 2020 the information system for dealing with Covid was; I would wheel in a whiteboard and grab a marker and Simon Stephens would read out from scraps of paper, faxes that he'd got from the NHS…" - Dominic Cummings interviewed on Helen Lewis has Left the Chat, on BBC Sounds.
The #VictoriaPolice force is the subject of new revelations after recently marred by allegations of #corruption, including tainting important investigations and potentially lying to lawyers.
Freedom Of Information (#FOI) documents show that in the last decade, 14 Victoria Police officers have retired or resigned while #UnderInvestigation
And, finally, I'm a criminology masters student in my 40s, returning to university, with an interest in researching digital #surveillance and #privacy.
Public bodies sometimes seem to forget is often it's less embarrassing - and cheaper - to hand over information from #FOI rather than try to sustain weak exemption arguments.
Xmas & New Year is a great time for #FOI requests as you get stories in the bag for when news & journalists are thin on the ground. Here's a thread of some good examples you can save for next year...
A serious question about the #RussellBrand film: could Channel 4’s ‘nothing found’ response to the #FoI request be due to the documents having been deleted when they past their data retention period?