When you’re fighting for data, it’s good to know what’s gone before. We’re gathering together some of the most important decisions from the courts and the various FOI appeal offices.

A three-judge panel of Ontario’s Court of Appeal has thrown out a 2007 decision that threatened to severely restrict access to electronic records in the province.
The Divisional Court ruled that the Toronto police had no obligation under FOI legislation to write a small computer program to extract data in an anonymous format. But the appeals [...]

In this privacy complaint report, the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner raises concerns about access to personal information from the Ministry of Transporation driver and vehicle registration database. The matter involved a private investigator who had access to residential address information not available to journalists through an authorized requester program. But even though it doesn’t [...]

CBC has lost an important federal court case about access to electronic data.
The decision endorses a position advanced by federal bureaucrats that data requested under the Access to Information Act should be withheld if there is a chance someone could be identified by linking anonymous details in the data to other information that is already [...]

This judgement, discussed in detail in a recent Media Magazine piece republished on J-Source and in the Media Magazine columns section of CARinCanada, dealt a blow to access to electronic data in Ontario, if computer programs have to be written to extract it. 

This 2002 decision in the Ontario Divisional Court upheld the right of access to electronic files containing records of financial contributions to municipal election candidates.

In this 2006 decision , the Federal Court of Appeal reversed an earlier Federal Court decision and ordered the contents of air traffic control tapes related to four aviation incidents released. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada had withheld them saying they constituted personal information.
While not strictly a data decision, this ruling has important implications in terms of [...]

In this 2005 order, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario ordered the Ministry of the Environment to release its Drive Clean emissions testing database, including vehicle identification numbers (VINS). The commissioner rejected arguments that the VINS were personal information, but did allow that those related to law-enforcement vehicles could be withheld.

In this 2001 decision, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner ruled that writing simple queries to extract data does not constitute programming, and therefore must be charged at the $30 an hour fee instead of $60 an hour.