ArriveCAN’s Slack Lesson: If Ottawa Has the Record, Canadians Should Be Able to Ask for It

Ottawa calls it access-to-information modernization. After ArriveCAN, taxpayers should ask whether “modernization” means fewer public receipts.

Ottawa’s latest access-to-information debate should be judged by a simple conservative accountability test: if government has the record when a request arrives, Canadians should be able to ask for it.

That standard matters because the federal government’s 2025 Access to Information Act policy paper proposes redefining a “record” as an “official record” with ongoing business value and storage in official repositories. Treasury Board says the goal is to cut duplicate, irrelevant and low-value material from searches. Nobody should pretend the access system is working well. Delays are real, digital records are exploding and departments need better discipline.

But narrowing the legal universe of records is the wrong cure. The Information Commissioner’s response warns that the proposal could exclude whole categories of government-held material from Canadians’ right to know. That is not a clerical tweak. It is a power shift from citizens to institutions: departments would have more room to decide which communications count before the public ever gets to test the file.

ArriveCAN shows why this is dangerous. In a June 2026 report on Canada Border Services Agency access files, the Commissioner found that Slack was used in the ArriveCAN environment without enough access-to-information governance. According to the report, Slack was not searched for most relevant requests, and the platform was deleted in May 2023 without confirming whether it held records relevant to active access requests.

That should alarm anyone who cares about clean government. Modern public administration does not happen only in polished memos placed neatly in official repositories. It happens in emails, chats, draft exchanges, contractor channels, working documents and informal project spaces. Those records may be messy. They may be duplicative. Some may be exempt for legitimate privacy, security or cabinet-confidence reasons. But if they show how public money was managed, how procurement decisions were shaped or how officials responded to a controversy, they are exactly the kind of receipts taxpayers need preserved.

The Carney government should not answer the ArriveCAN lesson by building a narrower doorway. It should build a better archive. Require departments to govern collaboration tools before they use them. Preserve active-request material before platforms are deleted. Track searches across official and informal systems. Publish institution-by-institution delay data. Fund compliance where necessary, but penalize chronic failure. And keep the definition of record broad, technology-neutral and citizen-centred.

Transparency is not a favour from Ottawa. It is a condition of trust in a government spending public money. If ministers want to modernize access to information, the rule should be clear: no Slack loophole, no repository loophole, no “official record” loophole. If Ottawa has the receipt, Canadians should be allowed to ask for it.