One thing we weren’t expecting as second-year journalism students? Getting a legal letter from a lawyer representing our university.
A bit more than a year ago, as I stepped onto the 105 bus heading to the Loyola campus, I opened my inbox to find an email from a lawyer representing Concordia.
I was expecting an email from the university around that time, but not this one. The Concordian news team, then led by Emma Megelas and myself, had filed a number of Access to Information (ATI) requests to Concordia a few weeks prior.
This is a common practice in journalism, a way for reporters to get access to documentation held by public institutions such as universities. At the time in my second year of journalism, I was learning the ins and outs of access to information in class, and I wanted to both put that knowledge into practice, and look into possibilities of deeper, investigative stories for the News section.
By that point, we had filed the ATIs to Concordia and received an acknowledgement of receipt. As the deadline to send documents was approaching, we had been checking our inbox regularly, hoping to get started on our research.
This email wasn’t the response we were waiting for. As I opened the attachment, the words “UNIVERSITÉ CONCORDIA c. MARIEKE GLORIEUX-STRYCKMAN et EMMA MEGELAS” jumped out to me.
This was a cease-and-desist letter, signed by a partner and co-leader of the National Privacy and Cybersecurity Practice group at Fasken, one of Canada’s largest law firms. It claimed that our requests were “abusive and made in bad faith,” and that we were using access to information as a “means of pressuring the University.”
The access requests we had filed related to complaints about the Concordia shuttle, reports about increased tuition, information about the home countries of Concordia’s international students, security reports, professional emails produced by Concordia spokesperson Vannina Maestracci, and decisions sent out following previous ATI requests filed to Concordia.
To be sure, these requests were too broad — they had been filed, out of curiosity for the inner workings of their university, by two students who had entered the world of journalism a few months prior. We had expected correspondence with Concordia to clarify what documents we were asking for, a common practice for public institutions that we’ve experienced many times since this event.
We instead entered a lengthy legal process, for which our student newspaper could not afford legal representation.
To be clear, these requests were not made in bad faith. To us, this seems obvious. For the university to send lawyers after its student-run press, without first reaching out to us about the ATI requests, is deeply disappointing.
The conflict was eventually resolved in mediation, teaching us a lot about ATIs along the way. From this experience was born the investigation you can read in this issue, exploring transparency in Canadian universities.
Access to information laws were put in place to provide Canadians with the tools to hold their institutions accountable for the way they are run. They have led to many journalistic investigations, but they also allow anyone to hold a light up to governments, public health institutions, and many more.
In a time of misinformation and polarization, it is crucial that this goal of transparency is upheld, and that any individual be able to access information in accordance with the spirit of Canada’s ATI laws, including student press.
