Information Crisis Pandemic

A break from the calendar today.

I see that I am not alone in being frustrated with the Freedom of Information application procedure. It's an interesting story that I am posting below.

The reason for the problem is that when one finally gets the documents, the "smoking guns" are quite often revealed.

As you can tell, I do Not intend to stop with my application against the City of Windsor. I hope you come along for the ride and let me have your thoughts along the way.


Organization conducts access to information audit
Shannon Proudfoot, Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, September 22, 2006

When it comes to Canadians getting information from their government, facts are likely to grow stale or citizens exhaust themselves long before public documents are relinquished, an audit by the Canadian Newspaper Association shows.

Despite repeated admonishments from the federal information commissioner that unreasonable delay undermines Canada’s freedom of information laws, those who seek basic public information can still wait months for any acknowledgement of their requests. More than half the time, information is not released within the legislated timeframe, if at all.

"Delay is a chronic problem in every FOI system," says Alasdair Roberts, a Canadian specialist on access to information who teaches at Syracuse University. The lack of political will to fix the problem, he adds, has resulted in a shortage of resources devoted to processing requests and the absence of effective enforcement.

Government agencies will not take seriously the need to release public information in a timely manner unless there is a political price to pay, Roberts says, and Canada needs more watchdog organizations like those in the U.S. and Britain to exert such pressure.

In the CNA’s National Freedom of Information Audit, reporters across the country filed 66 formal written requests for basic public information, including pesticide use, bonuses paid to hospital executives and crime statistics. Of those, 53 per cent were outright denied or no records were provided within the 30-day limit set out in the legislation.

Federal information commissioner John Reid says more government agencies are automatically taking time extensions beyond the 30-day limit. A large number of those extensions, he says, are not justified.

He concedes that enforcement of information laws is a problem because fining government bodies simply results in public money recycling back into the same pool.

"Basically, the only weapon we have is publicity and shame," he says.

As wielded by Reid’s office, that weapon has been at least partly effective.

After he took over as information commissioner in 1998 and instituted annual report cards that forced government departments and ministers to account for delays, complaints about the issue dropped off dramatically.

In the 2003-04 annual report, Reid reported that delays generated just 14.5 per cent of complaints to his office, compared to almost 50 per cent in 1998-99. However, complaints about delay are on the rise again: 24.1 per cent in the most recent report, up from 21.1 per cent the year before.

"The time limits in the act have become like the speed limit," says Jay Krushell, an Edmonton lawyer who specializes in information and privacy law. "A speed limit is intended to be a maximum; most people view it as a minimum."

Krushell believes some of the sluggishness in the system may stem from access to information and privacy legislation itself. Before these became prominent issues in Canada, bureaucrats were not as "hyper-aware" of the implications of releasing information, any information, to the public, he says.

"The act is supposed to promote access, but practically speaking, in some ways it’s actually defeating that purpose," Krushell says. "The privacy part of the act is almost becoming a shield to justify not disclosing."

In the CNA audit, some of the longest delays stemmed from requests about pandemic planning at the federal level. Dean Beeby, deputy bureau chief for the Ottawa bureau of Canadian Press, filed six information requests with the Public Health Agency of Canada in late March. More than five months later, he has yet to receive any information.

After getting no acknowledgement of his requests, Beeby received a phone call the day before the 30-day limit was to expire, informing him that the agency was taking a 60-day extension. The staff member who called was apologetic and said the department was overwhelmed by work.

A full three months after he filed the requests, Beeby received a letter stating there were no records pertaining to one of them. There has still been no response to the other five requests.

The agency is well aware they are not processing or even acknowledging requests in a timely manner, says Ross Hodgins, the access to information and privacy coordinator for Health Canada, which also processes requests for the public health agency. Their office gets a higher proportion of complex requests for third-party information than other government departments, he says, but they recently increased staff numbers and hope to be caught up by the end of the year.

"We acknowledge we’re behind, we acknowledge we’ve got a backlog. The good news is there’s support right from the minister’s office to ensure that gets resolved," Hodgins says.

However, there is evidence that delays in other departments are deliberate and intended to thwart media access to information that could be politically damaging if exposed to the public. Alberta Premier Ralph Klein came under fire in the spring of 2004 for his personal use of government airplanes. Soon after, Klein made it known that his office would vet all requests to examine the logs, and opposition politicians and reporters on political "fishing trips" might be denied.

In response, a pair of Edmonton Journal reporters made a freedom of information request to view the flight logs. Hefty fees were assigned, and no fewer than nine individuals signed off on the documents before they were released close to six months later -- two days after the provincial election in which Klein was returned to office.

The logs revealed wasteful use of the government planes, and the newspaper ran a series of stories last March, one of them quoting an unidentified civil servant who explained that government employees are instructed not to process information requests from the media during the "red zone" preceding an election.

However, Marisa Etmanski, director of communications for the premier’s office, is critical of reporters pursuing an "agenda" against her office, and insists staff simply needed more time to process a complex request.

"Does it look suspicious? Yeah, because it was around an election time," she says. "But our thing is, it just takes so long."

After an investigation for the provincial information commissioner found that a doctored e-mail had been submitted as evidence in a public inquiry on the case, Alberta Justice asked the RCMP to formally investigate whether a government employee should face criminal charges. Experts say this is the first known case in Canada of a criminal investigation involving breaches of freedom of information law.

Charles Rusnell, one of the Journal reporters who made the initial information request, says his newspaper has now made it a policy to fight each access to information decision against them.

"What is forgotten in all this is that this information does not belong to the government -- they’re merely the keepers of this information on our behalf," he says. "This information belongs to the public, and we should have access to it in a reasonable way."