The Red Tape Act's Privacy Carve-Outs

Bill 46 is branded as a routine "red tape reduction" bill — the kind of omnibus housekeeping legislation Ontario governments pass regularly to streamline minor regulatory processes across dozens of statutes at once. Most of its 22 schedules genuinely are that: moving where municipalities publish financial statements, adjusting snowmobile classification rules, updating consumer-report disclosure requirements, and changing Royal Ontario Museum trustee counts. The branding is precisely what makes the bill an effective vehicle for provisions that would draw scrutiny on their own.

Schedule 16 gives the Minister of Red Tape Reduction — the same minister sponsoring the bill, Andrea Khanjin — new authority to collect, use, and disclose personal information from people who participate in public consultations, without being bound by the safeguards Ontario's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) normally requires. Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Patricia Kosseim, formally objected in a written submission to the legislature's standing committee on heritage, infrastructure and cultural policy, describing the schedule as effectively giving the minister "carte blanche" over the personal data of consultation participants. That objection is documented directly in the IPC's own published submission on Schedules 16 and 20 of Bill 46.

Schedule 20 lets the Minister of Environment, Conservation and Parks exclude waste-management information from freedom-of-information requests. Commissioner Kosseim called this "a significant erosion of a quasi-constitutional right" — access to government information — carving an entire subject area of environmental and public-health relevance out of the public's statutory right to know. Labour union Unifor separately raised concerns in its own submission on Bill 46.

Bill 46 received Royal Assent and is now law — enacted as Statutes of Ontario 2025, chapter 24, per the Legislative Assembly of Ontario's bill record. Schedule 16's new ministerial data-collection powers and Schedule 20's waste-management FOI exclusion are now in force, meaning the privacy and transparency concerns the Information and Privacy Commissioner raised during committee review were not addressed before passage.

The pattern is one that has recurred across the Ford government's legislative program: substantive changes to privacy and transparency law attached to bills branded as minor, technical, or administrative — attracting far less public and media attention than a standalone privacy bill would. Schedule 16 hands the Minister of Red Tape Reduction discretion over how personal data from public-consultation participants is collected, used, and disclosed, without the FIPPA safeguards that would otherwise apply — a precedent that other ministries could point to when seeking similar carve-outs in future omnibus bills.

Separately, Schedule 9 of the same bill retroactively validates a specific 2021 Public Guardian and Trustee royalty-sale agreement with mining company IAMGOLD Corporation, closing off potential litigation over whether the province had authority to sell that forfeited property in the first place. Retroactively legislating away the legal risk on a specific past transaction — rather than fixing the underlying statutory authority prospectively — is a pattern worth tracking alongside the bill's privacy provisions, since both use the omnibus red-tape vehicle to resolve government exposure with minimal scrutiny.