Medicine Hat resident Nicole Frey has routinely criticized city council and senior staff over the past year. Courtesy Nicole Frey

By Eli J. Ridder

FOIP

Alberta official denies City of Medicine Hat’s ask to ignore resident’s information requests

May 16, 2024 | 6:14 PM

Alberta’s information and privacy commissioner on Thursday denied the City of Medicine Hat’s ask to discard a series of access requests made by a resident wanting to know more about employee salaries, hiring policies and other various items.

Nicole Frey, who regularly criticizes city council and high-level staff, filed five information requests under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act during January and February of this year after the city restricted communications with her.

Medicine Hat on Feb. 12 asked the province to authorize the city to disregard the requests, a power the commissioner is granted to rule on through the FOIP Act.

The city wanted to ignore the requests due to their “repetitious and systematic nature, the fact that their frequency and length unreasonably interfere with the operations of the municipality, they amount to an abuse of the right to make such requests and they cross into the realm of being frivolous and vexatious.”

Privacy commissioner Diane McLeod refuted the city’s reasoning that the access requests abused the act in her letter. Eli J. Ridder/CHAT News

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Privacy commissioner Diane McLeod refuted the city’s reasoning that the access requests abused the act and said it did not provide enough evidence as to why fulfilling the requests would “unreasonably interfere” with its operations.

In a rigorous 15-page response to the city steeped in statutory references, McLeod said that, just because an information request can interrupt regular city business, the municipality should not use that as a reason to ask for an exemption.

“It will usually be the case that a request for information will pose some disruption or inconvenience to a public body; that is not cause to keep information from a citizen exercising his or her democratic and quasi-constituitional rights,” McLeod wrote in her response.

READ: Information and privacy commissioner’s response

“I am not satisfied, on the basis of the evidence provided to me, that responding to these access requests will unreasonably interfere with the public body’s operations,” she added further in the letter.

Frey, for her part, found the decision offered relief.

“I’m so incredibly grateful to the privacy commissioner for supporting citizens’ democratic rights to transparency and for the bit of vindication it provides against the city manager’s narrative of me and my reasons for wanting to access information,” Frey said.

“I only used FOIPs because of the city manager’s direction to late last year. When the city then accused me of being vexatious, frivolous and wasting taxpayer dollars in doing so, I was extremely frustrated.”

Frey also appreciated the comissioner’s decision to release her response publicly. She also shared the decision in an email sent to members of council, the city manager and CHAT News.

The city has not yet provided a timeline to Frey outlining when she would receive the information she asked for.

A spokesperson said Thursday the City of Medicine Hat would not provide comment at this time.

What was filed?

Frey has long been critical of council.

During skyrocketing electricity prices in summer 2023, she was a leader of the widespread backlash council received from the community.

In October, Frey launched a petition to recall Mayor Linnsie Clark that did not gain the required signatures — 40 per cent of the city’s population — to remove the mayor.

Since fall of last year, Frey has filed a total eight freedom of information and privacy requests. Only five of the requests were considered part of the scope of the commissioner’s response letter.

Here’s a summary of Frey’s five requests:

• Jan. 5 — information about bonuses, severance and termination pay; council salary information; estimated cost for preparing council’s interim report; and city contracts in place with a third-party service provider.
• Jan. 5 — any correspondence between council and senior staff that mentions Frey — the city said this would require redactions for 1,256 internal emails.
• Jan. 21 — employment contract and other information for former city manager Merete Heggelund.
• Feb. 5 — a variety of city policies and bylaws, job descriptions and organizational charts, among other items.
• Feb. 5 — copies of the correspondence, meeting and conversation records related to why the city manager asked the city clerk resend the letter reminding Frey about the communications ban.

Frey has filed several more FOIP requests in the months since February, according to files sent to members of the media. The city has petitioned the privacy commissioner to disregard those, too.