Last year, Ontario universities received $1.8-billion in operating grants from the government.

A number of universities, including the University of Toronto, have gone ahead and set their own access-to-information policies, but others, such as the University of Guelph and York University, deal with requests for information on a case-by-case basis.

"Universities are given extraordinary leeway," said York University professor David Noble, a major critic of the commercialization of universities.

He recently struggled to get a copy of York's proposal for a grant from a government fund known as SuperBuild.

Although successful in the end, his request was denied several times because, officials said, it would damage the university's competitive edge.

Mr. Noble said the government should step forward and put the universities under the act. Otherwise, he said, they can hide such information as the terms in donor agreements and student admission policies.

Ontario universities have dodged the provincial access-to-information legislation since the late 1980s.
The Council of Ontario Universities, which represents universities in the development of public policy, was asked to develop its own parallel structure.

But the COU stalled as time went on, and at one point in the 1990s, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner told the government that universities should be accountable for the public funding they receive and be covered under the act, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.

In a letter to former NDP education minister Dave Cooke, then commissioner Tom Wright wrote: "Universities need to be more open with public, faculty and students to dispel the perception that such accountability is lacking . . . I believe that extending the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to cover Ontario universities would provide both the means to achieve, and a significant standard of, both openness and accountability."

Mr. Cooke told the commissioner that universities were well on the way to implementing their own act, which would be completed by December, 1994.

However, Charles Pascal, who was a deputy minister of education under Mr. Cooke, grew frustrated and told the universities that they would be put under the provincial act because little progress had been made on their part.

Mr. Pascal also criticized the COU's draft guidelines, saying
they provided weak access to financial records.

"Unless the guidelines can be substantially strengthened to provide significant access to information while also protecting personal privacy, and unless we can be assured that the guidelines will be adopted by all universities, it will be difficult for the ministry to justify continued support for the guidelines approach . . ." Mr. Pascal wrote in June, 1994.

The COU assured Mr. Pascal that it would revise its guidelines, and then extended the deadline for implementation to July, 1995. The COU also told the government the guidelines would be evaluated three to five years after the final implementation date.

Shortly after, a new government came into power, and the matter dropped out of sight.
Since then some universities have created their own freedom-of-information policies, while others are still implementing theirs.