Article content

Victoria — B.C. won’t be following Ottawa’s lead in eliminating fees for freedom of information requests, but the province will be unveiling different reforms next week, the finance minister says.

The federal government announced Thursday it would waive all costs for public records requests beyond the initial $5 application fee, as part of promised reforms to the federal access to information process.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or B.C. won't follow Ottawa in eliminating Freedom of Information fees Back to video

B.C. doesn’t have an application fee, but it does sometimes charge hundreds of dollars to search and produce records people request under the Freedom of Information Act.

“I don’t want to pretend fees are going to disappear,” Mike de Jong said Thursday. “But we’ve beefed up the budget significantly as you know for facilitating FOI. For legitimate applications for information, we don’t want fees to be an impediment.”

De Jong said he’ll unveil next week a host of FOI reforms, including expanding release of records like ministerial calendars, presumptive release for records caught up in delays and more help to automatically transfer requests to ministries in which the records are located. That’s in addition to $3 million in additional FOI funding in this year’s budget.