Library and Archives waives access-to-info fee
Collecting $5 from users far more trouble than it was worth
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) gets a lot of flak for its processing of Access to Information Act (ATIA) requests, especially for its long delays to respond. But lately they’ve been doing a few things right.
To wit, they’ve begun to waive the standard $5 application fee for every new request coming through the door.
In doing so, they’re abandoning a wonky system that cost them about $14,600 each year to process requests that brought in fees worth only $6,000 or $7,000 – and they couldn’t even keep that cash. All the revenue was turned over to the government’s general coffers.
So to save money, they stopped collecting money.
“The current process is inefficient, creates delays and is a poor user experience,” says an internal document, dated Nov. 12. “[F]urthermore, no funds are retained by LAC to offset costs.”
LAC thus acknowledges the folly of using a broken bucket that leaks faster the more that is poured into it. A handful of other federal institutions have also dropped their $5 application fees over the years: CBC-Radio Canada, National Defence, the Information Commissioner’s office and Crown-Indigenous Relations.
The internal LAC document outlining the change was obtained under the Access to Information Act, for which the $5 application fee was waived. Read it here:
For years, the federal government’s primary means of collecting the $5 fee, never increased since 1983, was through an applicant’s cheque, which typically cost a department $50 to process. An online request service available to most institutions was launched in October 2018, allowing for digital payments on credit cards, dramatically reducing payment-processing costs to mere pennies.
But many users still prefer the traditional way: paper-based requests sent via Canada Post enclosed with a cheque or a bank draft (which itself can cost twice the face value). At Library and Archives, 30 per cent of access-to-info requests still arrive in this old-fangled manner, creating administrative headaches. And there’s no in-house electronic payment system at LAC to help ease the pain.
Last fiscal year, LAC had to issue 124 refunds to mail-in requesters for various reasons, driving up the institution’s administrative costs. The federal government’s online system, on the other hand, processes refunds electronically at little cost.
Leslie Weir, Canada’s national librarian and archivist, approved the fee-waiving policy on Nov. 26. Fees had been routinely waived since early 2024 only for those requests submitted to LAC by Indigenous groups, under a wider Treasury Board policy. Now everyone gets a break on fees at LAC.
The internal document acknowledges the no-fee policy could trigger more requests, but points to the examples of National Defence and Crown-Indigenous Relations where dropping the $5 charge did not lead to any significant increase in requests.
Library and Archives also launched a new digital service in June 2024 whereby the original documents released through access-to-information requests are made available to everyone. The searchable database now contains almost 20,000 historical documents, covering a wide range of dates.
Two other institutions – the National Capital Commission (NCC) and CBC-Radio Canada – had also been posting original ATIA documents online, but their databases were shut down last year after Canada’s languages commissioner ruled that everything had to be translated into the other official language, whether English or French. CBC and NCC, which had been posting only in the original language of the document, declined to absorb the expense of translation and terminated the projects.
LAC is not required to translate its posted documents because they are historical rather than operational and therefore not subject to the rules of the Official Languages Act.
The latest moves at LAC are a small respite from criticisms of historians and others, who have complained that a long-standing system for automatic declassification of historical government documents has been supplanted by ad hoc access-to-information requests, which now are required to declassify older records. Critics say the ATIA process is unpredictable, unwieldy, time-consuming and fraught with dubious redactions.
One requester seeking older RCMP records under access-to-information was advised by LAC not to expect a response for at least 80 years.