Ontario's Premier Accountability Dashboard · Queen's Park Watch
Patricia Kosseim
Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario
Patricia Kosseim is Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner. In March 2026, she published a formal rebuttal to the Ford government's proposed FIPPA amendments, fact-checking three specific government claims as factually incorrect and warning the changes would make Ontario one of the most secretive governments in the country.
Connected Scandals
The Ford government buried amendments inside the 2026 Budget Bill that would permanently exempt the Premier, all cabinet ministers, and their staff from freedom-of-information requests — retroactive to 1988 — nullifying every pending FOI request and active court case, including those seeking Doug Ford's personal cellphone records and Greenbelt-related emails. Ontario's own privacy watchdog publicly called three of Ford's stated justifications factually incorrect.
As Information and Privacy Commissioner, Kosseim publicly disputed the Ford government's rationale for the FIPPA overhaul, fact-checking three of the Premier's stated justifications and warning the amendments would paradoxically increase cybersecurity risk by pushing officials to personal devices.
The Ford government secretly ordered Ontario civil servants to halt all freedom-of-information request processing for more than a week in May 2026, without notifying the province's Information and Privacy Commissioner — then Ford dismissed public concern by calling critics "the media party," despite his own government's data showing 96% of FOI requestors are not media.
As Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Kosseim was not notified of the province-wide FOI freeze before it took effect on May 16, 2026. She publicly stated the freeze raised "significant concerns about the public's right of access to government information." Her office's independent oversight role was circumvented by the government's unilateral decision to halt all FOI processing for seven days.