Ford Loses Court Bid to Hide Personal Phone Records but May Still Escape Disclosure

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has suffered another legal setback in his years-long fight to keep his personal phone records out of the public eye, after the province’s highest court swatted down his government’s latest attempt to block an order requiring him to hand over his call logs.

The Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed the government’s application for leave to appeal on May 19, effectively breathing new life into a transparency order that had been frozen while the legal challenge played out. The ruling means civil servants are once again obligated to go after records from the premier’s personal cellphone records that sit at the heart of one of Ontario’s most closely watched political scandals.

The dispute traces back to a single week in November 2022, when Ford’s government quietly moved to allow real estate development on swaths of the protected Greenbelt a decision that triggered a provincial integrity investigation, cost several senior officials their jobs, and drew accusations that developers with ties to the government had received preferential treatment.

Global News pursued the call logs from that period through Ontario’s freedom of information system, arguing the premier had been conducting government business on his personal phone and that those records belonged in the public domain. Both the province’s Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC) and a divisional court agreed, concluding that Ford regularly used his personal device for official communications and that those communications were subject to disclosure laws.

Their orders directed civil servants to obtain the relevant entries from Ford’s cellphone, review them, and determine which calls were made in his official capacity as premier.

The government’s response was to keep appealing. When a three-judge panel upheld the original ruling in January, Ford’s office announced within days that it intended to challenge that decision too. Lawyers for both the government and the premier personally asked the IPC to hit pause on its order while the new appeal was considered, warning that proceeding could harm the premier. The IPC agreed and told civil servants to stand down.

That stay is now gone.

Following the Court of Appeal’s May 19 decision, the IPC wrote directly to government officials on Friday, notifying them the suspension was lifted and the original order formally designated PO-4577-F was back in force.

“Accordingly, I now lift the stay on Order PO-4577-F and reinstate the… order provisions,” an IPC adjudicator wrote in the letter.

Civil servants have been given a 30-day window to obtain the relevant call records from the premier, assess which entries qualify as government business, and make their conclusions public.

Ford’s office offered a carefully non-committal response, saying it was “reviewing the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision and determining next steps.”

Here is where the story takes a sharp turn.

Despite the court’s ruling, many legal observers say Ford is unlikely to ever actually be compelled to surrender his phone records not because the courts are on his side, but because his own government quietly rewrote the rules while the case was still being litigated.

Buried inside Ontario’s 2026 provincial budget was a sweeping overhaul of freedom of information legislation that critics have called among the most aggressive rollbacks of government transparency in the province’s history. Passed in April, Bill 97 granted the premier, cabinet ministers, their parliamentary assistants, and their staff near-blanket immunity from access to information requests. The changes also stripped away the transparency oversight and privacy protections that had previously applied to those offices.

Crucially, the amendments were written to apply retroactively meaning they are designed to reach back and cover the very records at issue in the Ford case.

The practical effect is significant. Civil servants who were ordered to retrieve and review the premier’s call logs could soon issue a new decision simply declaring that the records are no longer subject to disclosure laws under the amended legislation. If that happens, the court’s ruling becomes a legal curiosity rather than an enforceable order.

It remains unclear exactly when or how the government intends to invoke the new law in this case. What is known is that the rollout was bumpy. After Bill 97 passed, freedom of information staff across the Ontario government were told to pause their work entirely for more than a week while senior officials scrambled to develop guidelines explaining how the new rules were supposed to be applied.

The IPC, for its part, is pushing back at least procedurally.

A spokesperson for the watchdog made clear that if officials do invoke the new law to reverse the disclosure decision on Ford’s phone records, that reversal can itself be challenged.

“Cabinet Office is responsible for considering and applying the law as it currently stands, including any relevant amendments under Bill 97,” the spokesperson said. “Any access decision made by an institution may be appealed to the IPC in accordance with Ontario’s access and privacy laws.”

In other words, any attempt to use the retroactive legislation as a shield could trigger yet another round of appeals and potentially a constitutional challenge to the law itself.

Legal experts have already flagged that retroactively rewriting rules to undo an adverse court ruling raises serious questions about the rule of law and the separation of powers. Whether those arguments gain traction in court remains to be seen.

The clock is ticking on a 30-day deadline that civil servants may or may not honour and Ontarians are left watching a transparency battle that, more than three years after those November 2022 phone calls were made, shows no sign of reaching a clean conclusion.