Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner ordered the Ministry of Health to disclose disputed pharmacy-chain claim counts and payment totals under the Minor Ailments Program, rejecting a third party’s attempt to block access.
In Order PO-4885, Appeal PA26-00145, issued August 21, 2026, adjudicator Elana May found that the ministry-generated totals did not meet a key requirement of the exemption for third-party business information.
The case concerned aggregate figures for the 2024 calendar year—not patients’ records or the details of individual claims.
Two rows in a broader spending spreadsheet
The access request sought the number of visits and amounts billed by the 10 highest-billing groups, along with province-wide totals, so the requester could calculate those groups’ share of activity.
The responsive record was an Excel spreadsheet showing accepted Minor Ailments Program claims and payments for the 10 highest-billing pharmacy chains, plus aggregate totals across all pharmacies. Only two rows, relating to two chains, remained disputed.
Before deciding to release the record, the ministry notified an affected party and sought its views. The party opposed disclosure under section 17(1) of Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The ministry nevertheless granted access, prompting the appeal.
Individual claims and government totals were different information
The business-information exemption requires three things: information of a protected type, such as commercial or financial information; information supplied to government in confidence; and a reasonable expectation of one of the specified harms from disclosure. All three must be established.
The appellant argued that pharmacies initiated and submitted individual reimbursement claims, and that the totals were simply a compilation of those submissions. On that view, the information had been supplied to the ministry in confidence.
May drew a distinction between the underlying claims and the information actually being requested. The spreadsheet did not reproduce individual submissions. It recorded the number of accepted claims and the amount the ministry paid after applying the program’s rules.
Those totals were information generated by the ministry, rather than information supplied by the pharmacies in the form appearing in the record.
The adjudicator also found that releasing the aggregates would not allow accurate inferences about particular underlying claims. The totals could not be connected to any one submission, and different combinations of accepted claims could produce the same reimbursement amount. In-person and virtual services, for example, attracted different professional fees.
Disclosure ordered without using the public-interest override
Because the “supplied” requirement failed, May did not need to decide the other elements of the exemption, including the claimed harms from disclosure. Nor did she need to consider the requester’s argument that the public-interest override required release.
The order upheld the ministry’s access decision and required the disputed information to be disclosed in full between September 23 and September 28, 2026.
The ruling turns on the aggregate record before the adjudicator. It does not establish that every pharmacy submission is public, decide the merits of individual reimbursement claims or identify improper billing.
