By Patricia Maloney

After a five-year legal battle, I am again able to have access to Ontario abortion information. For five long years the only statistics I could obtain were from the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI). The problem was this data is inaccurate. CIHI publishes accurate hospital abortion statistics, but does not publish statistics on abortions performed in doctors’ offices. As well, clinics do not have to submit their abortion numbers to CIHI, and many do not.

To circumvent this problem, I began filing freedom of information (FOI) requests to the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care. Any Ontario citizen can ask the Ontario government about any healthcare service by submitting an FOI. I was asking for abortion data based on OHIP billing, so I knew the data I received would be pretty accurate. I knew that an abortion performed is an abortion paid for—all courtesy the tax payer.

Back in 2012, I made a few requests based on different abortion billing codes. My FOIs were all granted, except my last one which was denied.

The denial letter informed me that there was now an exclusion clause in the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act (FIPPA) that specifically excluded abortion.

The government didn’t consult with anyone.

I was stunned.

I hadn’t heard anything about this. How could this be, when my other FOIs had all been granted? I set out to understand what happened.

What I learned was that the government had quietly inserted an abortion-exclusion clause into FIPPA as part of an omnibus bill, ironically titled the “Broader Public Sector Accountability Act”. The Act included a one-line sentence stating that FOI request “[do] not apply to records relating to the provision of abortion services.”

What was really interesting was that there was no public debate about this exclusion clause and there was no debate in our legislature. The government didn’t consult with anyone (although later they said, ‘Oh yea, we had an oral submission from the Ontario Hospital Association’).

Fast forward to the present: after appealing my original FOI refusal, taking my appeal to the Ontario Privacy Commissioner, and asking the courts for a judicial review of my case; I along with ARPA Canada finally ended up in the Superior Court of Justice arguing this was a Charter violation of our freedom of expression rights.

We argued that without accurate abortion information, our freedom of expression was not being honoured.

“Does having less than 50 percent of the statistical information on a matter of important public interest allow for a meaningful public discussion?”

The government argued there were “health and safety” concerns with giving me the information. That was nonsense, since I never asked for any personal information about doctors or patients. The government also argued that I could just use CIHI’s data. But, as I have already stated, that data is grossly under reported, so it is essentially worthless.

In the end, Judge Marc Labrosse agreed with us and our arguments. We won!

So why is getting this data so important? There are many reasons accurate data of a publicly paid health procedure should be available to all tax payers. I think Judge Labrosse summed it up well in his judgment:

“One could simplify the main question as being: Does having less than 50 percent of some of the statistical information on a matter of important public interest allow for a meaningful public discussion? For reasons which follow and given the place the abortion debate takes in the Canadian political and social environment, I think the answer to the question is ‘no’.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Patricia Maloney is an Ottawa writer and pro-life blogger. She blogs at http://run-with-life.blogspot.ca/