The access to information dumpster
Two departments burden the access system with immigration files
Good journalists frequently have barbed encounters with flaks for government ministers and departments, who delay, duck and obfuscate when asked direct questions. Bad journalists simply resign themselves to quoting their non-answers.
Years ago, the flak pack was handed a fresh dodge: the Access to Information Act.
“For that information, you’ll have to make a request under access to information,” they could now claim. If I’ve heard that bogus line once in the last 40 years, I’ve heard it a thousand times.
Never mind that the Act (2.3) explicitly says the law is “intended to complement and not replace existing procedures for access to government information and is not intended to limit in any way access to the type of government information that is normally available to the general public.”
Media-relations staff ignore that caveat, and blithely wash their hands of tough questions by directing reporters to the transparency law. They know full well that sanitized documents will be released harmlessly many months later, when today’s radioactive issue has safely cooled. (The same freedom-of-information diversion is a common tactic in the provinces as well.) Many frustrated reporters will not even bother to file.
The practice of channeling awkward inquiries by journalists into access-to-information requests has significantly burdened the system, driving up backlogs and costs. Lengthy delays in responses are now pervasive, further serving the interests of elected administrations. Governments wring their hands about the expensive public resources needed to run access to information, never with any acknowledgement that their own calculated opacity is largely to blame for the price tag.
Now there’s a new twist on this long-standing abuse of access to information.
Caroline Maynard, the federal information commissioner, reported this week on how would-be immigrants to Canada are getting the same pat answer as reporters have for years: “For that information, you’ll have to make a request under access to information.”
Two departments have direct control of the applications that potential immigrants file when they want to come to Canada: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). Lots of these hopeful, anxious people understandably want updates on where their applications stand. They often hire consultants and lawyers to do the work.
Many years ago, federal immigration bureaucrats made a fateful decision. Rather than build an online tool that would provide these individuals with timely updates, they decided to dump the problem on the existing access-to-information system. If you want your file, you’ll have to file an access request, these people and their agents were told.
Immigration-related access requests soon started to overwhelm the system. By 2022-23, about 86 per cent of requests received across all of government were of this type. Only 14 per cent were non-immigration related, or about 33,000 of 237,000 in total.
Maynard’s report this week warned that the problem, which began more than a decade ago at IRCC, has spread to CBSA, which has digital access to the same immigration database. Although she does not say so, it appears that requestors frustrated with the backlogs at IRCC are trying to jump the queue through the CBSA’s back door. No such luck. Now both departments are buried in requests that they can’t process fast enough, and complaints are piling up at Maynard’s doorstep.
Maynard flagged the problem back in 2021, and IRCC promised then to build an online system by 2023-2024 to divert these immigration-related requests away from access to information. But as for so many government IT projects, the department has blown past its deadline and now says it may have a working system late next year.
Mercifully, other departments have not shirked their responsibilities to individuals who need government information about themselves. The Canada Revenue Agency, for example, allows secure online access for individual files. No access request required.
“[T]he status quo is simply untenable,” Maynard said in releasing her latest report. “The already overwhelmed access to information system is no substitute for purpose-built tools and mechanisms that allow individuals to obtain the documentation they need quickly and easily.”
Now if only the commissioner could give a stern lecture to those tight-lipped flaks.