Stoodley denies Tory claims she broke privacy law with comments in House
Immigration minister revealed details of pending access-to-info request to her department
The Opposition Tories want Newfoundland and Labrador's privacy commissioner to look at what they call a Liberal cabinet minister's "highly inappropriate" handling of an access-to-information request, which they believe contravenes the law.
But Immigration Minister Sarah Stoodley says she did not violate the legislation, and fully respects and complies with it.
The dispute goes back to Dec. 4, the final day of the House of Assembly's fall sitting. Stoodley rose when given an opportunity to answer questions for which notice had been given in the legislature.
But the question she began to address hadn't actually been raised in the House — it was sent to her department by the Tories via an access-to-information request.
Stoodley told the legislature she wanted to "provide some colour and information for the general public about that request because I think it's very important."
According to the PCs, at that point Stoodley's department had not even acknowledged receiving their request, which related to the success of provincial immigration efforts targeting the United Kingdom.
Opposition House leader Barry Petten rose in protest, calling it "grandstanding here to give a political response to an [access-to-information] issue to an embarrassing situation with the soccer team in the U.K., which we all know is a farce."
The Speaker ruled that the legislature was not the appropriate forum for the response, and Stoodley was not permitted to continue.
Stoodley did not agree to an interview with CBC News. In an emailed statement, she denied any wrongdoing.
"I do not know the name or type of applicant associated with the request," Stoodley's statement noted.
"It was important to me to provide details to the House of Assembly on the timeframes for international recruitment."
The Tories aren't buying that explanation.
"The rules are that the minister is supposed to be arms-length, they're not supposed to know the day-to-day [access to information] requests coming in," Petten said in an interview.
"That's the integrity of the [access to information] legislation — it's not meant to be driven or decided by political motives."
'Impartial, fair and principled' process in place
By law, only a tight circle of civil servants directly involved in processing access-to-information requests are allowed to know who has filed them.
That even extends to knowing the broad category to which the requester belongs — for example, media or political parties. The limitation applies until the final response is sent.
The government's own policies and procedures manual explains why: "This provision is intended to ensure that the focus of the response is on the merit of the request, as opposed to the identity or type of requester, and that each request is handled in an impartial, fair and principled manner."
The blue-ribbon review committee that rewrote the transparency law a decade ago — chaired by former premier Clyde Wells — found that a system where requests are scrutinized by senior staff or the minister "facilitates the interpretation of [the legislation] in a partisan political way rather than in a fair, principled way."
Newly-minted information and privacy commissioner Kerry Hatfield — who just took on the position days ago — declined comment at this time.
Stoodley did not respond to follow-up questions from CBC News.
The questions included whether it is standard procedure for the minister to be advised of the content of access-to-information requests to the department, and whether she has ever before publicly revealed the details of a request before the department has issued a final response.
This is not the first controversy involving the province's efforts to attract people from the U.K.
Last month, the immigration department acknowledged that it had publicly overestimated the impact of a high-profile game involving a lower-division professional English soccer club.
Taxpayers are spending more than $170,000 over the next two seasons to sponsor fourth-tier Barrow AFC.
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