Access to Information Orders
Decision Information
The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) is a non-share capital, not-for-profit corporation established under the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation Act (the MPAC Act). Every municipality in Ontario is a member of MPAC, and the organization is governed by a 15-member board of directors appointed by the Minister of Finance. The Board includes municipal representatives, property taxpayers and members representing provincial interests.
Decision Content
NATURE OF THE APPEAL:
Background
The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) is a non-share capital, not-for-profit corporation established under the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation Act (the MPAC Act). Every municipality in Ontario is a member of MPAC, and the organization is governed by a 15-member board of directors appointed by the Minister of Finance. The Board includes municipal representatives, property taxpayers and members representing provincial interests.
MPAC administers a uniform, province-wide property assessment system based on current value assessment. One of its duties is to prepare an assessment roll for each municipality in Ontario. Municipalities use the information in the assessment roll to calculate property taxes. Section 14 of the Assessment Act sets out the information that MPAC is required to include on the assessment roll that it provides to each municipality. This information includes:
• A description of the property sufficient to identify it;
• The names and surnames, in full, of all persons liable to assessment in the municipality;
• The person’s religion, if they are Roman Catholic;
• The type of school board the person supports under the Education Act;
• The number of acres, or other measures showing the extent of the person’s land;
• The current value of the parcel of land;
• The value of the land leased to tenants; and
• The name of every tenant who is a supporter of a school board.
Sections 10 and 11 of the Assessment Act require property owners and other assessed persons to provide information to MPAC assessors. Section 13 of the Assessment Act makes it an offence to refuse to comply with MPAC’s lawful demand for information. In other words, property owners and other occupiers (e.g., tenants) in Ontario face a statutory compulsion to disclose information about themselves and their properties to MPAC.
Under sections 39(1) and (2) of the Assessment Act, MPAC must deliver the assessment roll to the clerk of the municipality, who then must make it available for inspection by the public during office hours.
MPAC also collects other personal information about property owners and occupiers pursuant to its duties under other statutes, including the Municipal Elections Act, the Education Act, the Municipal Act, 2001, and the Provincial Land Tax Act.
The information collected by MPAC is maintained in a database known as the Ontario Assessment System (OASYS), which MPAC describes as its “master file.” The OASYS database contains information about 4.3 million properties, including 623,389 Toronto properties. These include residential, commercial, industrial and multi-residential properties that may be owned by individuals, corporations, sole proprietorships, partnerships or unincorporated associations. MPAC claims that the OASYS database contains the personal information of 10.7 million individuals in Ontario. It developed OASYS to store the electronic data relating to property owners and their properties that it collects from various sources, including its own data collectors and external sources.
The OASYS database contains 159 fields of data, many of which are not available on the public assessment rolls. In other words, the database contains all of the information found in the assessment rolls but also includes significant amounts of additional information about property owners and their properties.
MPAC also operates an online service known as Municipal Connect that is available by subscription for tax-collecting bodies, particularly municipalities. Subscribers receive a password that allows them to search for relevant details of properties (within their municipal jurisdiction only), such as location, legal description, frontage, depth, roll value and school support. They must sign a license agreement that restricts the use of data to purposes authorized by statute. The license agreement stipulates that, “[p]ursuant to section 53 of the Assessment Act, the information on this file is provided with a non-exclusive and non-transferable right to use the assessment information only for the purpose of meeting your planning requirements and shall not be used for any other purpose.”
Moreover, MPAC has a Business Development Group that sells information to the public in electronic format. However, the electronic information sold by MPAC is stripped of personal information and is subject to license agreements that limit the purposes for which the information may be used, including a prohibition against sale or transfer to others. The fee charged is based on a standard pricing structure developed by MPAC.
MPAC is covered by the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (the Act). Section 7(1) of the MPAC Act provides that:
The Corporation [i.e. MPAC] shall be deemed to be an institution for the purposes of the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and that Act applies with necessary modifications with respect to the Corporation.
Consequently, any person may request access to records that are in the custody or under the control of MPAC.
The Access-to-Information Request
The requester, who is a councillor on Toronto City Council, filed an access-to-information request under the Act with MPAC:
On behalf of the members of Council for the City of Toronto, I am requesting that each member be given access to the Ontario Assessment System (OASYS) for the purpose of accessing the names, addresses and property data of constituents within each member’s respective ward. Access is requested either (i) in the form of an OASYS CD or (ii) via direct on-line access through MPAC’s Internet base ‘Municipal Connect’.