ANALYSIS: 3 pages, 520 days of delay, and Canada’s busted access-to-information system

Justin Trudeau came into office in 2015 promising to fix the federal government's access-to-information system. Six years later, it's arguably worse.

It ought to have been a simple request.

Filed electronically, the access-to-information request asked the department of Global Affairs Canada (GAC) for a memo, identified not only by title but also by the departmental tracking number GAC uses, that described a program to provide foreign diplomats hosted tours of Canada’s Arctic territories.

The memo should have been easy to find, easy to process, and easy to release.

But GAC’s system for responding to access-to-information is so broken that this request, which produced a three-page memo in which not a single word was blacked out by government censors, took 520 days or nearly 18 months to process.

The pandemic has made things worse but GAC was failing its legal obligations to provide requested records within 30 days long before the pandemic. For example:

There are dozens more examples in which records that were requested from GAC by document number and title, which should be released in 30 days or less, routinely take 200 days or more to process.

On Monday, Global News emailed the office of the new Foreign Affairs Minister, Melanie Joly, to ask if she thought this standard of performance was acceptable. Her office acknowledged the request for comment but did not provide a response.

GAC may be one of the worst offenders but it is not the only one. Long delays in defiance of the timelines laid down in law in the Access to Information Act are routine for requests filed to the departments of National Defence, the RCMP, Statistics Canada, Crown-Indigenous Relations, and so on.