TORONTO—Political staff in Ontario’s Liberal government are interfering in freedom of information requests and politicizing the process, the opposition parties charged Monday.

The New Democrats used the freedom of information law to request information about how previous FOI requests were handled, and found their inquiries were flagged by Liberal staffers as coming from an opposition party and were labelled “contentious.”

Emails between Liberal staff at the ministry of finance showed legislative assistant Andrew Chornenky, now Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s press secretary, told other staff to label an NDP request as contentious even though it originally was “not a contentious” file.

“This government is far more interested in covering its own mistakes than in letting the people know what’s going on in this province,” said NDP critic Peter Tabuns. “People have a right to know and these Liberals should not be covering things up.”

The Liberals say it was Chornenky’s job as legislative assistant to alert the minister to such contentious issues.

The Progressive Conservatives said they too were “very concerned” to see Liberals politicizing the FOI process and labelling opposition request as contentious.

“I’m just very uncomfortable with this notion that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal staffers are sifting the FOI requests and flagging which ones are political, flagging which ones come from media and which from the general public,” said Opposition Leader Tim Hudak.

“This process should be fair and unbiased. Information comes out to whoever asked for it, not based on how they vote or what party they are part of.”

Labelling a request contentious merely alerts the government to potentially troubling issues and hardly amounts to political interference, said Duncan.

“So they put the word contentious on it,” said Duncan. “It has no bearing in law or regulation. We see hundreds of things every day and (it means) look at this carefully, it’s contentious, and that’s it.”

Duncan rejected opposition claims that Liberal staffers are politicizing the freedom of information process by intentionally slowing down the release of data labelled as contentious.

“No I don’t think that’s quite what happens,” he said. “I just think it’s called contentious. It’s not a determination, it’s just an interpretation, a point of view.”

The opposition parties weren’t buying the government’s argument and said the Liberals were using the FOI process to delay data requested by the Tories and NDP.

“If you’re acting in a way that is slowing down the process or blocking information from going to the public you’re politicizing it, and that’s what they’ve done,” said Tabuns.

The Tories are worried “about the Liberals playing politics and trying to hide things from the public,” said Hudak.

“It’s very concerning that Liberal party staffers are going through these and saying which ones come from political parties, which from the general public,” he said. “Why is that important?”

The current government is doing just what previous NDP and Progressive Conservative governments did with “contentious” FOI requests, said the Liberals, who noted they expanded the legislation to cover hydro companies, universities and hospitals.

The Liberals also say they have the best response record, meeting 85 per cent of freedom of information requests within 30 days, compared to just 57 per cent under the Tories and 50 per cent for the NDP government of the early 1990s.