Treasury Board no access-to-info leader

Agency a poor example for rest of government

Treasury Board of Canada, a central agency of the federal government, is Ottawa’s cheerleader for access to information.

The institution gathers statistics, sets policy, organizes training, produces manuals, offers guidance, oversees programming, all to support more than 260 other departments in carrying out their legal requirements under the Access to Information Act.

Treasury Board has many other responsibilities, including acting as a check on spending. As a committee of cabinet, for example, it vets all major budget requests from other departments. The institution also sets human-resource rules for the federal public service, such as work-from-home policies.

But access-to-information is a vital part of its work. Some 18 of its public servants work full-time in this area, which costs $2.3 million in salaries and other operational line items.

Treasury Board also receives several hundred access-to-information requests from citizens and others each year about its own operations. It thus has a foot in two camps - processing its own requests, and advising other departments about how to process the requests they receive.

So the institution is in the spotlight: Does it set a good example for others? Does it do as it preaches?

Treasury Board recently published an annual report about the 365 requests it received in 2023-2024. The upshot is that it set a poor example. You might even say, ‘Physician, heal thyself!’

The biggest failure has been for its “on-time compliance rate;” in other words, did the institution respect the deadlines set out in the Act for delivering documents?

Only 71 per cent of the requests it processed were delivered within legislated deadlines, either within an initial 30-day period, or whatever additional time extension the institution gave itself.

That’s its worst performance over at least the last decade. The annual non-compliance rate had never before dropped below 81 per cent.

Even worse, many of its on-time responses involved no records whatsoever - that is, there were no documents that responded to the request. ‘No-record’ requests are easy and fast to process. They can boost performance numbers without the department actually earning them.

Treasury Board says if you remove these ‘no-record’ requests, and count only the requests with responsive records, the on-time compliance rate fell to 56 per cent in 2023-2024. “In instances where there are records to review or provide to the requester, the records were only provided on time just over half the time,” says the report.

As explanation for its poor performance, Treasury Board says requests have become more complex, each requiring more documents to be reviewed and more pages to be processed. It’s a trend dating back more than a decade.

And yet, staff numbers have not grown. Of its 18 access-to-information employees, only about half (9.4 full-time equivalents) actually handle requests. The rest focus on system-wide issues in the Government of Canada.

The number of frontline workers has been “consistent” over the years, as the report sugar-coats it. Translation: the workload has been rising but the workforce has been stuck at the same level for years.

Meanwhile, three other Treasury Board employees are in charge of “compliance monitoring,” recording just how badly fellow access workers are coping across government. See anything wrong with this picture?

Treasury Board is a microcosm of growing system-wide dysfunction with access-to-information. More damning, it’s also an institution that is failing to meet the standards to which it holds others.

The annual report concludes that “the ATIP office successfully increased its productivity while simultaneously refining its processes,” and that Treasury Board intends “to build on its achievements.” Funny how very different things look from the outside.