DOSMUKHAMEDOV: Can Diana Gibson have It both ways?

Public officials are judged not only by what they promise, but by whether they remain faithful to the principles that brought them into public life. 

That standard applies squarely to Diana Gibson, Minister of Citizens’ Services, who has now guided into law a measure that critics argue erodes the very institutional accountability she built her earlier career defending.

Before entering politics, Gibson served as Research Director of the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta. Her published work consistently stressed institutional accountability and the public’s right to know. In a 2012 Parkland Institute report on government privatisation and transparency, she pointed to Alberta’s refusal to disclose contract details as part of the reason a national study had ranked the province last among Canadian jurisdictions for access to information. 

Those most vocal about accountability, she noted, were often the same ones pressing for greater contracting out — and, as her report put it, you cannot have it both ways.

That sentence, written by Diana Gibson the researcher, now describes Diana Gibson the Minister with a precision she may not have intended.

As Minister, Gibson carried Bill 9, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Act, through to passage on May 28, 2026. Among its changes, the bill amends the section of FIPPA that requires public bodies to make every reasonable effort to assist applicants and respond “without delay,” replacing that duty with one to respond “without unreasonable delay” — a more elastic standard that leaves officials themselves to judge what is reasonable. 

The bill also expands the grounds on which public bodies may ask to disregard requests said to be abusive, or to interfere unreasonably with their operations. It drew sustained opposition through every stage of debate and passed third reading on the final day of the session by the narrowest possible margin — on the Speaker’s casting vote, after the House divided evenly.

The government’s stated rationale is administrative burden and backlog. Those pressures are real, and any access regime must be workable. But efficiency and accountability are not interchangeable principles. Granting public bodies wider discretion to decline or delay requests, without first ensuring that the institutions meant to oversee them are themselves operating fairly, does not resolve a backlog. It shifts the burden onto the citizen.

That concern is not hypothetical. During committee stage, MLA Rob Botterell — who led the team that drafted British Columbia’s original 1992 FOI legislation — placed on the permanent Hansard record documented concerns about whether the province’s information-rights oversight was meeting basic standards of procedural fairness. 

He asked the Minister directly whether she would meet with the Information and Privacy Commissioner to address those concerns before the bill proceeded. Her reply was four words: “There are clear processes.” She did not identify those processes, and moved on.

It is no answer to say the Minister could not have done more. The independence of statutory officers means a minister cannot direct or investigate them — a principle the Speaker affirmed two days later, on May 28, when he ruled that concerns of this kind belong before the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. But that ruling is the point, not the excuse. A clear, accurate, independence-respecting answer to Botterell’s question was available — that the proper route for these concerns was the Committee. The Minister could have said so. She did not. She said four words and named nothing.

The researcher who once documented the failures that ranked Alberta last among the provinces had become the Minister expanding officials’ discretion. Asked on the legislative record to name the safeguards that would keep that discretion in check, she did not identify them.

There is a further gap that should trouble anyone who takes Gibson’s earlier work seriously. The province’s privacy regulator collects no demographic data — none — on whose complaints are declined or closed. It keeps no statistics broken down by ethnicity or community of any kind. The consequence is straightforward: a system that has just handed officials wider discretion to delay and decline requests has no way of knowing whether that discretion falls evenly across communities, or whether some are quietly shut out more often than others. 

One cannot allege discrimination on such a record — but neither can anyone disprove it, and that is precisely the problem. Expanding discretionary power while declining to measure its distribution is the opposite of the accountability Gibson once demanded.

Before politics, Gibson also co-founded what became one of Canada’s leading Indigenous-owned consulting firms, supporting communities in environmental assessments, consultation, and land-use negotiations — work that depends directly on timely access to government records. 

For Indigenous communities, freedom-of-information law is not an abstract principle but a practical instrument for holding governments to account on lands, resources, health, and rights. The Minister whose earlier career was built in part on that work has now narrowed the framework that makes it possible.

Gibson’s pre-political record rested on a single, consistent argument — that public bodies must be transparent, that citizens have the right to know how public power is exercised, and that accountability cannot be traded away for administrative convenience.

Her record as Minister advances the opposite proposition — that public bodies need more discretion, that requests can be characterised as burdensome, and that when a sitting MLA raises documented institutional failures on the floor of the Legislature, four words constitute a sufficient answer.

The Diana Gibson who wrote that you cannot have it both ways was right. The Diana Gibson who carried Bill 9 into law is proving the point.

British Columbians are owed an explanation of how the Minister responsible for access-to-information legislation reconciles her earlier advocacy for institutional accountability with a law that narrows it — and how she squares her four-word parliamentary answer with documented concerns, placed on the same legislative record, about whether the oversight processes she invoked are working for the citizens who depend on them.

They are also owed an answer to the question the researcher Diana Gibson posed years ago, and the Minister Diana Gibson has not addressed: can you really have it both ways?

On the present record, the answer appears to be no.

Dr. Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov, LLB (Hons), LLM, DPhil (Oxon), is a Former Senior Associate Member and Research Fellow of the University of Oxford.