Ontario Premier Doug Ford uses his personal cellphone for government business. We know that because his own lawyers admitted it in court. I know it for another reason too. He has called me on it. Twice. Not to chat. Not to reminisce. He called to talk about policing and justice reform. That is not personal business. That is government business.
Ford’s Phone, Public Business, and the Fight to Keep It Hidden
April 2, 2026
And it is that choice, using a personal phone for public work, combined with a refusal to disclose the records of that work, that sparked a years-long fight over access to information.
At the centre of that fight was something deceptively simple: the Premier’s call logs for 55 specific days. Not the content of calls. Not transcripts. Just the basics of who, when, and how long. Two requests sought those records after it was discovered that the Premier’s government-issued phone had no call activity for the entire period. None. The obvious question followed. If the work was being done, where were the records?
The answer was Ford’s personal phone. Ford argued that this made them private.
The Information and Privacy Commissioner disagreed. If Ford’s calls involved government business, they were public records, no matter the device. The government appealed. They lost. They appealed again. They lost again. The Divisional Court’s message was clear. You do not get to dodge transparency by switching phones.
Ford’s response was not to comply. It was to change the rules.
The government announced it would introduce legislation to retroactively block access to records from the Premier, ministers, and their political staff. So, we have even less transparency than we started with.
And there may be a reason for that urgency.
The period covered by some of the records overlaps with the Greenbelt scandal – a decision to open protected land for development, despite clear promises not to, through a process the Auditor General found was “seriously flawed” and gave certain developers “preferential treatment”.
This is not the first time records have gone missing. During the Greenbelt controversy, a top Ford aide was also using a personal phone for government business. When relevant messages were requested, the government claimed they had been accidentally deleted. Convenient. It seems the Ford government does not just prefer doing business off the books; it has a habit of losing the books altogether.
There is a reason governments keep records. And there is usually a reason when they do not want anyone to see those records.
Access-to-information laws are not technical niceties. They are, as the courts have recognized, a cornerstone of democratic accountability. They exist so the public can understand how decisions are made, who influenced them, and whether power is being exercised properly. The Auditor General put it plainly: “To maintain public trust and confidence, government and its ministries need to show that they are transparent in decision-making, and that they act fairly in the interests of all Ontarians. Not only do the people of Ontario care about what is done, they equally care about how things are done.”
That promise did not age well.
Because what we are seeing now is the opposite. A government that resisted disclosure. Lost in front of an independent watchdog and lost again in court. And instead of accepting those rulings, it is now trying to rewrite the law to make the problem disappear.
And the proposed law is breathtakingly broad. The Information and Privacy Commissioner did not mince words. She called the proposal “shocking” and warned it would “seriously undermine” the principles of transparency and accountability. She was even more direct about its impact: “The most alarming proposal would prevent Ontarians from accessing any government information held by the Premier, cabinet ministers, elected officials, and political staff”. She also made clear what this is really about. “This amendment is about hiding government-related business to evade public accountability”.
Ford’s response has been to accuse the Commissioner of being political. That is convenient. Because if there is one thing more effective than avoiding scrutiny, it is discrediting the person asking questions.
Make no mistake, this is about transparency, not politics.
No one is holding the Ford government to a higher standard than their predecessors. No one is asking for personal texts. No one is trying to slide into Ford’s off-hours private DMs or late-night browsing predilections. The requests are for government records. The same kinds of records that have been subject to access laws for decades.
Ford says only the media and opposition care. That is not true. Most Ontarians oppose Ford’s secrecy laws. Polling shows 60 percent are against the plan, including a majority of conservative voters. It turns out people like the idea that their government should not operate in secret.
There is a stench to all of this. When a government refuses to disclose records, loses in court, and then moves to change the law to avoid disclosure, it raises a simple question. What are they trying so hard to hide?
As Justice Louis Brandeis famously put it, sunlight is the best disinfectant, which may be exactly why this government is trying to hide in the shadows.