We have all had that one hobby that perhaps got a little bit out of hand. For some, it is sourdough starters; for others, it is collecting vintage Volvos. But for David Eaglestone, a semi-retired businessman from Smithers, his passion project was a bit more bureaucratic: filing an astronomical number of information requests with the Insurance Council of British Columbia.
In the recent case of Eaglestone v. Insurance Council of British Columbia, we get a front-row seat to what happens when a hobbyist’s quest for documents meets a regulatory body’s breaking point, leading the court to finally throw up its hands and say, “enough is enough”.
The drama began when Mr. Eaglestone and his company, Majestic Forest Management Ltd., decided they needed to get to the bottom of how certain insurance agencies under the Western Financial Group umbrella were being regulated. Mr. Eaglestone was not exactly a stranger to these agencies. He had been involved in previous fire insurance litigation where they played a peripheral role, but that case was long over. When the court asked why he was still hunting for these documents, he explained he was simply acting as a “concerned member of the public.”
Seems unconvincing.
Mr. Eaglestone did not have a personal stake, a current lawsuit, or even a contract with anyone involved, yet he was on a fervent mission to extract every scrap of information he could find.
The scale of this mission was, frankly, legendary. By the time the matter reached the BC Spree Court, the petition record—the actual physical documents related to the case—measured over six feet tall. Most of that height was comprised of ICBC’s exhaustive efforts to satisfy Mr. Eaglestone’s repetitive requests spanning several years. To put that into perspective, six feet of paper is taller than your average person, and it represents a staggering amount of ink, toner, and human patience.
The court noted that ICBC is responsible for regulating insurance agents and adjusters, a task they moved largely online in 2016 using a software system called ACCELA. This transition meant that many of the “paper” records Mr. Eaglestone was hunting for simply did not exist in physical form anymore.
Despite the fact that much of the information he wanted, like licence numbers, statuses, and effective dates, was already publicly searchable in an online directory, Mr. Eaglestone remained unsatisfied.
Starting around September 2021, he began a relentless campaign of Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act requests. In 2021, he filed eight requests, consuming 120 hours of staff time from ICBC’s legal and IT teams. In 2022, he filed eight more, costing another 70 hours. By 2023, he was up to ten requests and 100 hours of staff time. Not one to slow down, between January and November of 2024, he fired off twenty three more requests, requiring another 140 hours of work from the council’s staff.
It was not just the Insurance Council feeling the heat. The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner was also dragged into the fray. In June 2024, Mr. Eaglestone sent the OIPC emails with attachments totalling hundreds of pages. Even after the OIPC specifically asked him to stop submitting documents, he continued to send batches of 40, 45, and 36 pages at a time. By early 2025, he was still at it, sending 72 pages of documents in a single day. The OIPC eventually had to beg him to just resubmit only the necessary documents to actually start a formal review.
When the case finally made its way into the courtroom, the proceedings were just as chaotic as the paper trail. There were short-notice applications, judicial management conferences, and even orders issued to control Mr. Eaglestone’s conduct before the hearing could even begin.
One justice remarked that Mr. Eaglestone’s pleadings lacked clarity and that he was seeking damages that were not even available in this type of proceeding. Even while the court was in the middle of writing the final judgment, Mr. Eaglestone was still trying to demand access to ICBC’s offices to review more documents, which forced yet another hearing just to tell him to wait for the decision.
The legal issues boiled down to whether Mr. Eaglestone had received everything he was legally entitled to, whether he was unlawfully barred from ICBC’s office, and whether he should be paid for his so-called effort in pursuing all this. ICBC, on the other hand, wanted the court to declare him a vexatious litigant to stop the cycle of repetitive requests. The council had reached a point where they were effectively being held hostage by one man’s bottomless curiosity.
Ultimately, the court sided with the regulators. Justice Branch found that ICBC had made perfectly reasonable efforts to satisfy the petitioner’s endless stream of requests. The court recognized the reality of the situation was that Mr. Eaglestone was never going to be satisfied, no matter how many boxes of paper or digital files they handed over.
Because he lacked a personal interest in the information, Mr. Eaglestone was was essentially using the freedom of information process as a full-time hobby, The court decided it was time to put and end to it all. In the world of administrative law, there is a fine line between holding the government accountable and burying it in paperwork. The court decided Mr. Eaglestone had crossed that line long ago.
This case serves as a reminder that while transparency is important to any government work, there is a limit to how much of the public’s time and money can be spent on one so-called concerned citizen’s refusal to take “we’ve given you everything” for an answer.
