Try it the next time you want to escape an awkward social interaction. “Oh, that is so interesting. It makes me think of my last access-to-information request.” If that doesn’t work, just add, “And can you believe what section of the Act they cited?”

But – for the five of you who haven’t clicked away yet – this is important.

Without freedom-of-information you would not know about the invisible poison gas permeating public housing in Canada.

You would not be able to do a detailed search of your local hospital’s finances.

You would not know that Canada’s federal government knew for years about “forever chemicals” contaminating a northern Ontario community before it acted.

You would not know how parole denials and indefinite designations stack the deck against Indigenous people in Canada’s justice system.

Your government works for you: You pay them. And government information is your information.

This is not a lofty goal or a wishful journalist’s hallucination. This is a core principle of our democracy.

You wouldn’t know it from the way our provincial and federal governments act.

As I write this I have more than 60 access-to-information requests pending at various levels of government. A significant majority are overdue, some by six months or more. A couple of departments have stopped responding to my charming inquiries altogether.

Lucky for me, while I wait I can spend time trying to parse hundreds of pages of heavily redacted, unsearchable PDFs with information censored from public view because it constitutes – wait for it – governmental “advice”, which is protected.

Every party likes transparency when in opposition. Once they’re elected, once they’re a government with stuff to hide, they suddenly lose their enthusiasm.

Freedom-of-information requests are not just for nerdy journos: Anyone can file them (and part of the reason requests to Canada’s immigration department take so long is that they’re backed up with requests from people wondering what on earth happened to their immigration applications).

If you’ve not yet checked out The Globe and Mail’s “Secret Canada” project, which evaluates Canadian FOI systems and guides newbies in navigating them, you really should.

The system is far from perfect. But we need it. It’s worth fixing.

Meanwhile, secretive governments are getting more secretive. 

Changes to B.C.’s freedom-of-information law would put more stringent requirements on people requesting information, more lax expectations in the timing of a response, and would allow officials more latitude when refusing to respond to a request.

Last fall, Nova Scotia backtracked on a promise to give its privacy commissioner more power.

The federal government is proposing freedom-of-information changes that would, among other things, make it easier for a public body to take longer when responding to your requests and easier to refuse them outright. It would create a category of “transitory” public records that are exempt from access requests and destined for destruction. 

It would also allow for “emergency” time extensions in the case of pandemics or floods. (My darling, if it took a force majeur to extend the timeframe of a response, I would have a lot more responses.)

Last week the Ontario government announced its intention to change freedom-of-information legislation to shield the premier, government ministers and parliamentary assistants from the sunlight this law is intended to provide.

The change would also give government departments more time to respond to information requests.

The change would also be retroactive, jeopardizing requests already in the pipeline. That includes a Global News fight for Premier Doug Ford’s phone records. The Toronto Star is also embroiled in a battle for information.

The government has said this is about modernizing the legislation and bringing Ontario in line with other provinces.

“I cringe when I hear that word [modernizing] because it sounds so positive,” independent journalist and freedom-of-information expert Dean Beeby told me.

But this does nothing to update Ontario’s law for the digital age: It just puts more records out of reach.

(When I asked Beeby for his opinion on these cross-country changes he used the words “bogus” and “bullshit” three times each over the course of 20 minutes. I will be doing all my interviews with him from now on.)

“It’s like this wave of change in FOI regimes, and they’re all bad changes,” he said. “They’re all going to make it harder.”

Does every government have secrets? Of course. Do individual Canadians retain privacy over personal information? Absolutely. And every Canadian jurisdiction’s freedom-of-information legislation has exemptions under which a government can redact or simply refuse to release information. Much as it pains me to say so, I know these exemptions, judiciously employed, serve a purpose.

But is it really none of your business what your premier and his ministers do?

This is the same government that used code words to thwart document requests, according to the information and privacy commissioner.

If all this sounds like inside baseball, ask yourself: Do I want to know what my government is up to? And – why are they so intent on stymieing attempts to figure that out?

Tussles over freedom-of-information may seem like a burr for nerdy journos. Like fodder for hectoring at a party.

They are not.

We are mired in misinformation, disinformation and mistrust. Why should people place trust in governments that seem intent on hiding things?

Governmental obfuscation goes beyond journalistic angst. It runs counter to the public interest. It makes for an ill-informed population. It corrodes public trust and leaves a vacuum for mis- and disinformation to fill.

The people who work for you don’t want you to have information that you own. They’re betting you won’t care enough to make a fuss over it.

Prove them wrong.

And give me something else to rant about at parties.