Delay is toxic for freedom of information

Federal departments routinely flout legislated deadlines

In public affairs journalism, all information has a best-before date.

Citizens want to know what their governments are up to – right now, not months, years or decades after the fact.

Yesterday’s stale information is useless for influencing decisions today. Dated material is the proper domain of historians and academics. The rest of us need to know whether the government in power is shafting us. And we need to know in time to toss the scoundrels out in the next election.

That’s why Parliament in 1983 set time limits for governments to respond to requests for information under the Access to Information Act. The baseline limit was, and is, 30 calendar days.

Thirty days seems generous. But departments can give themselves even longer deadlines by invoking extensions, with few checks on how much extra time they can take. Library and Archives Canada once gave itself an 80-year extension. Many departments routinely add 60, 90 or 120 days. Some pad the due date by a year or more.

It gets worse. Many departments blow past their self-imposed, extended deadlines. That’s happened to me at least 15 times so far this year. Public Safety, RCMP, Corrections Canada, Immigration Refugees and Citizenship, and especially Privy Council Office, the prime minister’s own department, each let due dates slip by with nary a word of explanation.

I complained to the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) about each of these missed deadlines. The departments had all clearly violated the legislation, and all should have been held to account. Yet in all 15 cases, the OIC dropped my complaints, making no ruling about violations.

Why? Because in each case, the offending departments eventually provided me with responses, after the deadline but before the OIC had launched an investigation, which typically takes weeks or months to get underway. In the OIC’s final letters to me, the issue was declared “moot.”

“[A]ny further investigation of the complaint would have no practical benefit, now that a response has been provided.”

To take an example, Privy Council Office (PCO) gave itself a 120-day extension on my request for a memo to the prime minister on “refocusing government spending.” When the due date arrived, there were crickets. Not a word from PCO about why. I complained to the OIC, and waited.

Almost six months past its self-imposed deadline, PCO finally sent me the memo, heavily censored of course. And days after that, the OIC sent me a notice saying the issue was now “moot” and they were dropping the so-called investigation without making any finding. A clear violation of the Act would not even be recorded as such.

So I had waited almost a year for a deeply redacted document, which would then require me to file another complaint about the blacked-out bits. And not so much as a rap on the knuckles for PCO.

This tawdry bureaucratic drama was repeated 14 other times this year on my other delay complaints. Is it any wonder journalists are abandoning the Access to Information Act?

The OIC needs to revamp its complaint system, to better hold departments to account for their disregard of due dates, rather than blithely declaring these violations “moot.”

As it stands, growing delays have badly eroded a system that was always intended to give citizens a timely check on their governments. 

In her last annual report (2023-24), Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard said that federal institutions replied to only a third of access requests within “statutory timeframes;” that is, within 30 days or whatever additional time a department gave itself. 

And of the 310 orders she issued that year, 275 – or almost 90 per cent – were about delays or excessive time extensions.

Delays kill accountability. Delays are toxic to public affairs journalism. The politicians and their bureaucrats know it.