Flaying the Freedom of Information sinners

On April 10, 2010 Stephen Hume published in the Vancouver Sun a powerful and provocative denunciation of the British Columbia governments' evisceration of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA) that was introduced in 1992 as the new law governing information dissemination and personal protection privacy. Among his targets were my former employer the Royal British Columbia Museum and the division I worked for at the time, the BC Archives. The BC government in its wisdom placed the Archives under the Museum, which itself was turned into a Crown corporation through a new Museum Act on April 1, 2003. One of the facts Hume got wrong in his story, which was easy enough to check, was the number of hours the BC Archives reference room is fully staffed. He stated it was four hours Monday to Friday when in fact it is currently six hours (10 am to 4 pm). Hume draws this chilling analogy between the current state of the FOIPPA administration and the BC Archives:

The emaciated travesty that the archive has become under successive governments might be said to symbolize what has been going on for decades with freedom of information legislation.