Complaining about access-to-info complaints

PCO vilifies frequent access-to-info complainers as monopolizing public resources

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office wants to bust up a monopoly. I think I’m the target. Let me explain.

The Privy Council Office (PCO), home of the prime minister and cabinet, has been flooded with complaints about its failures to comply with the Access to Information Act.

Over the last five years, the number of formal complaints filed against PCO, and investigated by the information commissioner of Canada, has more than tripled.

There’s also been a bump in the number of orders that the commissioner has issued against the office, to 42 in 2024-25 from little more than a dozen two years earlier. Orders typically compel departments to deliver documents to a requestor by a specified deadline.

Senior bureaucrats in the Privy Council Office say the growing stack of complaints and orders is bogging down their operations, making it ever more difficult to process new access-to-info requests that come through the door.

“Complaints continue to have a significant impact on PCO’s ability to process and meet legislated timelines,” says a November brief for Michael Sabia, clerk of the Privy Council.

“Resources have been monopolized in responding to complaints in increasingly shorter time frames, including meeting OIC [Office of the Information Commissioner] Orders.”

The document goes on to explain its odd use of the word “monopolized.”

“Over the past five years, complaints have increased by 317%. Further, 71% of all new complaints are from three individuals. The complaint workload from three requestors monopolizes our resources and impacts our ability to respond to all Canadians.”

You can download the entire document (and read more about its context here):

PCO briefing, November 2025

390KB ∙ PDF file

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So who are those three cranky individuals who screw things up for everybody else? The document does not identify them, but I may be one of them.

I regularly file access-to-information requests to PCO, perhaps six to 10 each month. Many requests are for memos written for the prime minister, dealing with matters of state.

PCO almost always gives itself a time extension, beyond the standard 30 days, to respond to each request. Typically their extended due date will be 60, 90, 120 and sometimes 180 days beyond the initial period.

Those extensions are frustrating enough, but more often than not PCO will blow past the extended due date with nary a word of explanation. Imagine patiently waiting six months for a promised response, and when the day finally arrives the office goes silent.

Some years ago, I decided the only way to get PCO’s attention was to lodge a formal complaint with the information commissioner whenever the office ignored its self-assigned due dates. I’ve registered many such complaints.

So I’m likely a charter member of that triumvirate of monopolists that PCO wants to bust up.

My complaints are almost exclusively about PCO’s chronic failure to respond to my requests within legislated deadlines, which is a cut-and-dry grievance. Miss the due date, and I will complain. There’s really no defence for missing a self-imposed deadline. ‘We’re too busy’ doesn’t cut it.

What’s especially galling is that PCO accuses frequent complainers like me of monopolizing resources, thereby preventing timely responses to other Canadians. But that’s exactly why I’m complaining: the office repeatedly fails to deliver timely responses. Respect the due dates and the complaint problem is solved.

But bureaucrats inhabit a bizarro world. For them, the solution to reducing the administrative burden of complaints is not to provide better service. Rather, it’s to vilify the complainers as monopolizing public resources.

This is also the absurd motivation behind a recent proposal from the government to restrict the ability of the information commissioner to issue orders against departments. That is, instead of solving the root problem, just gag the complainers.