Ontario in secrecy-by-default mode, critics say after blue licence plate reversal

TORONTO — Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government is in secrecy-by-default mode, opposition critics say after reviewing the content of blue licence plate documents the province had been prepared to fight the release of in the courts.

The province’s information and privacy commissioner ordered the release of documents earlier this year on the government’s plan to get the plates with visibility issues off the roads, after the government denied a 2022 freedom-of-information request from The Canadian Press.

Government lawyers initially asked the courts to overturn that order but backed down days later and the documents at issue have now been released.

They show various options bureaucrats presented to the minister, at a cost to taxpayers between about $2 million to $2.5 million, for getting plates out of circulation, with the government ultimately going with the zero-cost option of just waiting for them to disappear through attrition.

The content of those documents has opposition parties wondering what the government was fighting for so long.

“Secrecy has become the default setting for this government — not out of necessity, but out of habit,” Liberal ethics and accountability critic Stephanie Smyth wrote in a statement.

“The blue licence plate rollout is a four-year-old story. The information is not sensitive. Its release would harm no one. There is no legitimate reason to withhold it. But that is who this government is.”

This short-lived transparency court case follows another in which Ford has been fighting the IPC-ordered release of his phone records. It also comes shortly after the government changed freedom-of-information laws to exempt all records of the premier, cabinet ministers and their staff from those requests.

Smyth said those two moves are connected.

“They retroactively rewrote Ontario’s freedom of information laws to shield the premier’s own records from scrutiny,” she wrote. “They have treated public accountability not as a duty, but as an inconvenience to be managed and minimized.”

Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner suggested that the government fought the release of the blue licence plate documents so it did not have to release materials on more substantive matters.

“It just feels like the government’s default option is secrecy, and they’re going to fight against anything to give people honest information,” he said.

The premier’s office has said the judicial review was filed “to preserve optionality” but direction was given soon after to abandon it.

When The Canadian Press first filed the request in 2022, it was more than two years after the government decided to pull the plates but no plan to actually get them off the roads was in sight.

The now-released records show that the government approved a direct mail approach to blue plate replacement in August 2020 and contracted Nova Scotia manufacturer Waldale Manufacturing Ltd., to produce and ship replacement packages.

But by mid-to-late 2022, the government was still debating how the replacement plan would work. Drivers were to receive new plates in the mail, but there was internal debate on whether drivers could just keep the old plates once they received replacements, to have drop boxes at ServiceOntario locations for drivers to return the old plates, or to have drivers return the old plates by mail.

The first two options would cost taxpayers about $1.9 million, with the mail return option costing $2.5 million.

In late 2022, an email from a civil servant said direction from the office of then-minister Kaleed Rasheed, who is no longer in government, was to proceed with the “status quo.”

“In that, as customers visit (ServiceOntario) offices they are provided with the option to replace their plates, and when they register a new vehicle only ‘white plates’ are provided and they would need to turn in their existing,” the civil servant wrote.

“There are to be no proactive communications to those that continue to have blue plates.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 29, 2026.

Allison Jones, The Canadian Press