GOVERNMENT INFORMATION POLICY IN CANADA

Two disparate trends have influenced Canada's long history of examinin g and developing government information policy. First, various publish ing policies of the 1960s and 1970s recognized the public's right to g overnment information. This trend culminated in freedom of information legislation in 1983. Following a transitional period in the mid-1980s , the advent of a corporate resource approach to government informatio n resulted in information policies that emphasized information resourc es management, cost recovery, and commoditization. Recent attempts to merge the inherent contradictions between the concepts of the public's right to government information and information as a commodity have r esulted in policy that leaves much to individual interpretation.