Quebec's access and privacy watchdog seeks a sweeping overhaul, though its report may go nowhere fast

Tashi Farmilo


Quebec's privacy and transparency watchdog tabled its 2026 five-year report at the National Assembly on June 11, asking for 74 changes to laws it says have fallen badly behind the digital age. The report from the Commission d'accès à l'information, the independent body that oversees both public transparency and the protection of personal data, warns that aging rules are slowing the public's access to government information and leaving people exposed to data practices the law never imagined.

A five-year report is the Commission's regular health check on these laws. It is advice, not legislation. The Commission cannot change any law on its own. It can only recommend, and the government of the day decides whether to act. That distinction matters a great deal this year, and it shapes how much weight the report is likely to carry.

For the Outaouais, the issues are concrete even though the region is never named in the document. The same provincial laws decide how the City of Gatineau and provincial offices answer requests for records, how the regional health network handles patient files, and what private companies are allowed to do with the personal information they hold on residents. The slow response times, the manipulative website designs and the quiet trade in personal data that the report describes are conditions the region already lives with. They are not findings the report pins on the Outaouais specifically.

The Commission saves its toughest words for the law behind public transparency, which it says has gone 44 years without a serious update. The result, it argues, is longer waits for information and the holding back of documents the public has a right to see. The numbers are plain. In provincial ministries alone in 2024 and 2025, more than a quarter of all access requests took longer than the legal limit of 30 days. The report makes a simple point about this: a request answered too late is, in practice, a request refused. It also counts the loopholes. Special exceptions written into the law, which let bodies sidestep the usual access rules, have grown from 89 to 118 over the past decade, a rise of 33 percent that the Commission says chips away at the law's strength every time another one is added.

To fix this, the Commission wants the law widened to cover more organizations that spend public money or carry out public duties, a full review of those loopholes, firmer limits on when a request can be turned down, and real penalties when a public body blows past its deadline. It also wants far more information posted automatically, before anyone has to ask. Right now, the rule that requires this kind of routine publishing applies to only about 7 per cent of the public bodies the access law covers. The Commission wants that extended to all of them, along with a single, searchable website where released documents can be found.

On the privacy side, the report gives Quebec credit for its recent overhaul, known as Law 25, which brought the province closer to European standards. But it warns that the basic idea behind these laws is buckling. Those laws assume a person knowingly hands over their information and gives consent. Much of today's data is watched, tracked or guessed at by computers rather than freely offered, and ordinary people have little power against large companies that collect it at scale. The Commission's proposals include clearer rules on what information a company actually needs to collect, limits on the mass harvesting of personal data to train artificial intelligence, tighter oversight of data brokers (companies that buy and sell personal information, often without the person ever knowing), and a public registry listing who those brokers are.

Several recommendations are aimed squarely at families. The Commission wants an outright ban on so-called deceptive designs, the tricks built into websites and apps that nudge people into choices that work against them. It points to a 2024 international study it took part in that found at least one such trick in 97 per cent of the apps and sites examined. It also calls for a ban on addictive design features on platforms popular with minors, a ban on selling a child's personal information, and a requirement for a parent's consent before a company uses software to draw conclusions about a child under 14.

The watchdog also argues it lacks the means to do its own job. Its budget grew from 8.3 million dollars and 73 staff positions before Law 25 to 12.2 million dollars and 92 positions for 2026 and 2027, but it says that growth has not kept pace with its workload, and that it received nothing extra for new duties in the health sector. It wants its money and staffing controlled by the National Assembly rather than by the government, so it cannot be squeezed by the same authorities it is meant to keep watch over.

Here is the hard part for anyone hoping these ideas become law soon. The report arrived only months before a provincial election set for October 5, with the legislature expected to finish its work by late summer. Normally a committee of elected members studies a five-year report and hears from the public, but with the Assembly closing before the vote, that study and any law that might follow effectively wait until a new government takes office. The boldest privacy ideas are not even firm proposals yet. The Commission frames them as the start of a public conversation about a future framework, not a finished plan ready to pass.

This is also not the first time the Commission has asked for a deep overhaul. Its last five-year report, in 2016, urged a substantial rewrite of the access law, and a decade later that rewrite still has not happened. The president behind this year's version, Lise Girard, a lawyer appointed by a unanimous vote of the National Assembly in late 2024, makes the case that half-measures will no longer hold, that transparency and privacy have become foundations of a working democracy, and that the province must decide what the next set of rules should look like instead of defending the last. Whether the next government listens, after an election fought on other issues, is the question the report cannot answer for itself. On the record so far, the safer bet is that a thick document of sound advice will once again sit on a shelf, waiting for a political will that has been slow to arrive.

Lise Girard, president of Quebec's Commission d'accès à l'information, whose 2026 five-year report calls for a sweeping overhaul of the province's transparency and privacy laws. Photo: Courtesy of the Quebec Access to Information Commission