Canada needs a morgue for freedom-of-info documents

Past and present lost in the ether

In their heyday, newspapers maintained ‘morgues,’ musty places where clippings were indexed and stored. Sagacious librarians ran these fiefdoms, locating yellowed newsprint scraps after being given only the barest clue from a harried reporter.

Today, news morgues have morphed into self-serve databases, as open as Google or paywalled to extract residual value from yesterday’s news and information. The process is efficient, but I do miss those librarians, usually women back then. Many of them were news polymaths.

So is there a morgue for freedom-of-information documents?

In Canada, alas, no. Great swaths of government information, extracted piecemeal by diligent requesters over the years, simply disappear into the ether. Official neglect about preserving these release packages is a kind of shadow censorship of our past and present.

In the federal sphere, Canadians can query an online database of Access to Information Act (ATIA) requests going back to January 2020, just over four years’ worth. And last year, Treasury Board published a dataset (for downloading) that contains request information going back to 2014.

But these two sources contain only meta-data, that is, information about when the records were released, what department released them, what subject, what file number, how many pages, and so on. The actual documents are not posted anywhere, and never have been.

Instead, database users are told to file informal requests, without charge, to the relevant departments to retrieve the original release packages. If the package is older than 2014, good luck finding out about it. And more recent packages are not necessarily retained in all departments, which can dispose of them after two years if the documents are deemed to be of no continuing business value.

So why not simply archive every ATIA document package online as it is released? After all, most releases are in digital formats and document storage ceilings are disappearing in the age of terabytes and petabytes.

Treasury Board, which is responsible for the overall administration of the Access to Information Act, says its hands are tied by two pieces of legislation. The Official Languages Act requires all federal government publications to be in both French and English. Translating millions of ATIA pages each year is just not feasible. And the Accessible Canada Act requires that publications be made available in alternate formats, such as Braille or large print, which also is not feasible on that giant scale. So an online government archive of ATIA documents is simply not in the cards, at least in the near term.

Notably, three provinces not bound by these laws are currently posting freedom-of-information documents online; that is, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and British Columbia. Theirs are imperfect systems, with limits and provisos. For example, only Nova Scotia government departments are posting documents, rather than all public bodies in the province, such as universities.

Ontario, Canada’s largest province, does not even post the meta-data about their freedom-of-information requests, much less the documents themselves. An energetic group at the University of Toronto - the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) - bravely took on this task recently with its Sunlight Project database, now with 75,000 entries. The IJB acquired this trove of data by - you may have guessed - filing freedom-of-information requests. Shame on the Ontario government for failing to provide such a basic tool.

The Globe and Mail, meanwhile, has created its own massive database of meta-data for completed federal and provincial requests. The Secret Canada project has more than 300,000 searchable summaries so far, though does not post original documents.

Another private group is working to establish a database containing full ATIA release packages at the federal level, posting the original documents, with an announcement expected this spring. Its designers are attacking technical problems with verve and ingenuity.

Preserving freedom-of-information packages for broader public scrutiny has tremendous benefits. These documents have often been requested by business users, such as law firms or corporations, who never make them public, unlike news media or environmental groups. Posting those documents online can pull important public material out of the shadows. Posting can also forestall new requests for the same material, easing pressure on busy freedom-of-information units.

And historians of modern Canada, whose work has been hobbled by the Access to Information Act, could at least gain some compensatory benefit from an online archive. One academic group, focusing on security and intelligence, has created its own specialized database of previously released ATIA records to do the proactive archiving that Ottawa is failing to provide. Security agencies in other countries, such as the FBI, are light years ahead of Canada in this regard.

So Canada has no national ‘morgue’ where freedom-of-information documents can go to lie in state. That job is left to a few public-spirited groups trying to pick through the bones.