British Columbia's wacky FOI follies

Reporters abandon crumbling system where more money gets less done

Reporters have been bailing on freedom-of-information requests everywhere you look these days. The numbers are sagging federally, as well as in provinces such as Ontario. Weary journalists are abandoning a tortuous process that makes them wait months to receive packages of blank pages.

A new report shows the phenomenon is also hitting British Columbia hard. The province that once had Canada’s most developed freedom-of-information culture has discovered a way to keep the media barbarians from the gate.

Michael McEvoy, B.C.’s information and privacy commissioner, delivered the grim news this week in a report on the province’s transparency performance over the last three years.

The number of media requests has crashed, to just 286 in 2022-23, from 908 the year before and 756 the year before that. The numbers for political parties and individuals also collapsed.   

At the same time, it was business as usual for many non-media users. Law firms, corporations, and interest groups all maintained or increased their historic levels of filing.

The reason for the media pullout is not hard to explain.

The law says requests should be answered in 30 days, though under certain conditions departments can extend that another 30 days. Delaying any further is unlawful.

McEvoy found that 43 per cent of media requests had been unlawfully delayed in 2022-23, a huge jump from 23 per cent the year before and 17 per cent the year before that. Unlawful delays in answering requests from political parties also rose significantly.

At the same time, timeliness stayed the same or improved for law firms or businesses.

The report says unlawful, delayed responses are taking on average 192 days, or more than six months, to complete. The worst offender for delays? The Office of the Premier, which took an average of 269 days to respond to each request it received in 2022-23. That’s nine months.

Absurdly delayed responses are clearly a nifty way to drive away reporters, who must survive in a digital ecosystem with deadlines measured in nanoseconds.

But British Columbia also has an insurance policy to keep the ink-stained wretches at bay: fees.

On Nov. 29, 2021, the province began charging a $10 fee for each request application. The previous fee had been zero, making the new fee the mother of all inflationary pricing, at roughly a gazillion per cent. (By the way, law firms and corporations can readily charge back the new fees to clients or deduct it from taxes. Impoverished newsrooms, not so lucky.) 

So today the province collects more money while receiving significantly fewer requests, largely because media and others are quitting the game. British Columbia is also spending $5.5 million to modernize its freedom-of-information technology and processes.

So what’s the net result of more cash and a lighter workload? The worst performance since McEvoy began measuring the timeliness of responses 13 years ago.

That’s either the wonky economics of government. Or a political gambit the province is winning handily.