The shrinking and inking of access to info

New Treasury Board report chronicles continued decline of FOI

Treasury Board of Canada released fresh government-wide statistics last week about citizens’ use of the federal Access to Information Act in 2023-24.

Among the most striking developments is a 10.5 per cent drop in the number of requests received last year, compared with the year before – the largest annual decline in at least a decade. That’s 5,520 fewer requests, from an all-time high of 52,377 requests filed in 2022-23.

The other notable development is a huge jump in the number of requests where no information was released to the requester. Some 26.2 per cent of all requests were answered without a scrap of information delivered, compared with 20.5 per cent the year before.

What’s going on here?

It’s important first to recognize that Treasury Board’s statistics strip out the mountain of requests received each year by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). These requests overwhelmingly come from non-citizens (mostly through agents) who want to see their current immigration files. The use of access-to-info to process such requests, imposed by IRCC, is a terrible misuse of the law. It distorts the numbers and wastes public resources.

So Treasury Board discards those IRCC numbers to get a clearer idea of the requests citizens are filing.

The big drop in new requests last year is likely related to the end of the pandemic, which generated a lot of interest in government health spending, programs and research.

Harder to explain is the big rise in no-info responses, where more than one of every four requests results in completely blank pages. A decade ago, these dud requests represented 18 per cent of all releases. The level has been steadily rising, and is now accelerating.

My own experience suggests departments, overwhelmed with too many requests and not enough staff, are defaulting to safe, reflexive processing modes: Quickly black out everything that’s problematic, and get the response out the door by the due date. My requests to Privy Council Office, for example, have increasingly returned drenched in black ink but on deadline (see my feed on X for examples).

And the surge in no-info responses may well discourage the filing of further requests, leading to last year’s big drop in filing – a double win for the federal government.

Another notable statistic in this year’s crop of numbers is the percentage of responses that were late; that is, documents delivered beyond legislated timelines in the Act. Departments initially have 30 days to respond, but frequently give themselves generous extensions of months or even years.

More than 30 per cent of responses last year violated these deadlines. They were delivered past the legislated due date, including well past those generous, self-imposed extensions. It was the second-worst performance of the last decade, after the pandemic year of 2020-21 (34.9 per cent), when there were genuine obstacles to processing requests. A decade ago, late responses were only half as bad as today.

So more documents are completely blacked out, and more are delivered late, even as Canadians abandon the filing of requests altogether. That’s why critics like me use the hashtag #broken.

And what of the news media? I’ve written in the past about how media use of the Access to Information Act is on the decline, for the obvious reasons that responses are heavily redacted and so late as to be useless for public-affairs journalism.

Treasury Board no longer provides charts or graphs showing the categories of users who file requests, so the task falls to those with the tenacity to navigate the department’s raw spreadsheets. (There are also problems with fuzzy definitions.)

With IRCC’s requests stripped out, there were 5,551 media requests to all other federal institutions last year, compared with 5,339 in 2022-23. So there was a negligible uptick in actual numbers, though media requests remain at a historic low (see my substack from a year ago). Every other category of requestor that is tracked files more requests than media: academics, business, organizations, and the public.

The low media numbers clearly reflect the declining cadre of journalists toiling in a troubled industry. But the weak take-up is also about poor results. Why bother to invest in a freedom-of-info request when the reward is a document delivered far too late, dripping in black ink?

Governments are asking a similar question: Why bother to invest in freedom-of-info? Dysfunction in fact serves their purpose, effectively neutering those pesky reporters who, after all, just make governing more difficult.