KITCHENER, Ontario, October 20, 2026 — Shinydocs today published a Bill 97 compliance guide for Ontario institutions. The company is also offering free records assessments to municipalities preparing for the change. Each assessment shows an institution what records it holds, where personal information sits, and how much content is redundant or obsolete.
Bill 97 received Royal Assent on April 24, 2026, and amends FIPPA and MFIPPA, Ontario’s public sector access and privacy laws. New freedom of information rules took effect on July 1, 2026. Response times moved from 30 calendar days to 45 business days. The definition of a record now covers data in any form.
On January 1, 2027, municipalities, school boards, and other MFIPPA institutions take on new privacy duties. They must complete privacy impact assessments before collecting personal information. They must also report qualifying breaches to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.
Each new obligation assumes an institution knows its own records. For most municipalities, those records sit across file shares, SharePoint, Teams, and email. Searching each system by hand is slow and easy to get wrong.
“Bill 97 asks municipalities harder questions about their records, on tighter timelines,” said Duncan McGregor, CIO of Shinydocs. “You can’t write a defensible privacy impact assessment for information you can’t find. We help records teams see what they hold first, so every decision rests on evidence.”
Shinydocs connects to existing systems and governs records where they already live, with no migration. Federated search supports FOI requests and staged access plans. AI classification flags personal information for privacy impact assessments and breach triage. Retention schedules apply in place, with a full audit trail, and nothing is deleted without staff approval.
The Town of Milton used Shinydocs to clean, classify, and prepare over 4 million files to meet records management legislation. Milton did it without moving a single file.
“Shinydocs is helping us meet our records management goals faster and without creating disruption,” said Nina Lecic, Manager, Legislative & Legal Services and Deputy Clerk at the Town of Milton.
Shinydocs is pre-qualified under Ontario Vendor of Record Tender #18914, so Ontario municipalities can engage the company without issuing an RFP. To learn more, read the Bill 97 compliance guide or book a meeting with the Shinydocs Ontario team.
About Shinydocs
Shinydocs gives law firms and other information-intensive organizations a fast, defensible way to identify, evaluate, and hand off the files that matter, across every system they run, with no file migration required.
Media Contact
Darcy MandersonVP of Marketing, Shinydocs
dmanderson@shinydocs.com
1-226-793-6478
www.shinydocs.com
