The Star: Ottawa : Saturday, May 12, 2018.
An estimated 275 Access to Information requests from Canadians are refused annually under proposed new powers to reject overly broad or vexatious applications.
Federal agencies expect to refuse to process an estimated 275 Access to Information requests from Canadians annually — less than one per cent of the total received — under proposed new powers to reject overly broad or vexatious applications, internal number-crunching suggests.
A federal spokesman acknowledges the Treasury Board Secretariat analysis — based on the experiences of provinces with such provisions — reveals that "only a very small percentage of requests" are turned down.
Transparency advocates wonder why the Liberal government is even bothering to usher in the new refusal powers in a federal bill currently before the Senate.
"The problem with the Access to Information system isn't the requesters. It's the responders — in other words, government," said Sean Holman, an associate professor of journalism at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
The Access to Information Act, which took effect in 1983, allows applicants who pay $5 to ask for federal documents, but it has been widely denounced as slow and antiquated.
The federal bill — one of the few attempts to revise the law — would require applicants to state the type of record being sought, the subject matter and the time-frame in which the documents were created.
The legislation would give agencies the power, with permission from the information commissioner, to decline to act on requests considered overly broad, vexatious, made in bad faith or otherwise an abuse of the process.
The Canadian Press used the access law to obtain the Treasury Board's statistical projections, which draw on figures in the various provinces that have "decline to act" provisions in their laws.
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