Confidential Information and Governments: Balancing the Public's Right to Access Government Records and an Oil and Gas Company's Right to Protect Its Confidential Information
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionI. Confidential information and trade secrets1. Confidential information defined2. What is a trade secret?3. Breach of confidence4. Confidential information in the hands of the governmentII. Access to information legislation1. Understanding the statutory structurea. Federalb. Albertac. Newfoundland and Labradord. Other provinces2. Judicial consideration of the third party business information exceptiona. General testb. Type of informationc. Confidential information supplied by a third partyd. Reasonable expectation of harmIII. One province s approach-contracting with Nalcor1. Comparing the two regimes2. Where the shareholder is the crown3. Canada-Newfoundland Offshore Petroleum Board4. Testing the new regime5. Can the existence of the information be denied?a. Severanceb. Mediation material and its treatment under ATIPPAc. Royalty regulations as a modelConclusionIntroductionWhile information has long been protected and managed in the oil and gas industry through contract and the common law, the introduction over the past thirty years of various access to information legislation, whereby the public is granted a right to access records under the control of a government institution subject to limited and specific exceptions, has materially changed the landscape for how private commercial interests interact and contract with the government.Of particular concern is the growing trend of political parties, the press and competitors using the access to information legislation to obtain significant and material commercial information about the activities, prospects and strategies of the private commercial interests in the hands of the government. It is now not uncommon to see access to information requests being advanced in respect of major new government proposals or initiatives in respect of the oil and gas industry. Of equal concern is the use of access to information requests to fish for information in the midst of litigation, where the rules of court would not allow access to the or to access information to ground an action where there is merely suspicion of an actionable wrong.Similarly, in the wake of the so-called sponsorship scandal, the Gomery Commission produced a report criticizing the actions of senior public officials and their secrecy. The report found that while [tjhere are valid arguments for secrecy concerning certain government operations... the arguments in favor of secrecy have been over-emphasized since the [access to information] legislation was first proclaimed into force on July 1,1983.* The report went on to say that: [c]ountless individuals reported that senior officials, both political and administrative, find various ways to deny providing information to the public.1 2With increased public scrutiny and an increasing sophistication in the scope and focus of the access requests made each year, participants in the oil and gas industry are well-advised to structure their interactions with government to take advantage of the limited and specific exemptions, or run the risk of their information being disclosed.In this paper, we seek to provide a practical overview of the landscape and issues that can arise when a private entity interacts with the government. First, we explore what is confidential information, providing a foundation for our subsequent discussion of the access to information legislation and how it interacts with a private entity's information. Second, we describe the public policy that lead to the adoption of the access to information legislation and the specific provisions that address how a private entity's in the hands of the government, may be protected under such legislation. Finally, we look to the specific example of how Newfoundland and Labrador has structured its access legislation in the context of Nalcor Energy (Nalcor), and its subsidiary, Nalcor Energy-Oil and Gas Inc. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".