Supreme Court rules Premier Doug Ford's mandate letters to be kept secret

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the Ontario government does not have to disclose Premier Doug Ford's mandate letters in a unanimous decision issued Friday.

«The Letters are revealing of the substance of Cabinet deliberations, both on their face and when compared against what government actually does,» wrote Justice Andromache Karakatsanis in the majority decision.

Mandate letters traditionally lay out the marching orders a premier has for each of their ministers after taking office — and have been routinely released by governments across the country.

But the Ford government went to great lengths to keep the premier's 2018 letters secret by appealing court orders to disclose the records all the way up to Canada's top court, which heard the province's appeal last April. Despite those efforts, a copy of all 23 of Ford's 2018 mandate letters was reportedly leaked to Global News in September of last year.

CBC Toronto originally filed a freedom of information request for the records in July 2018. The government denied access in full, arguing the letters were exempt from disclosure as cabinet records.

Ontario's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) states that any records that «would reveal the substance of deliberations of the executive council or its committee» are exempt from public disclosure under what's commonly referred to as the cabinet record exemption.

​​The interpretation of that exemption was at the heart of the mandate letter case. Several organizations intervened before the top court to argue that if the Ontario government's interpretation was adopted it would vastly expand the scope of records the government can keep secret from the public in a way that would undermine democracy and