“Inside Canada’s Broken Freedom of Information System”

A great article appeared in the Globe and Mail this morning calling attention to Canada’s “underresourced” and “broken” Freedom of Information (FOI) system.

Under the headline “How Canada’s FOI system broke under its own weight”, Robyn Doolittle and Tom Cardoso describe the challenges Canadian institutions are facing in responding to Freedom of Information requests.

I’ve responded before to media critiques of Canada’s Freedom of Information system, noting that from my perspective, such articles generally fail to provide both sides of the story, often eliding over the “sweeping” nature of requests that lead to large fee estimates, or conflating Canada’s various levels of government and then tarring them all with the same brush.

But today’s article effectively makes the case that despite rapidly growing government spending, when it comes to complying with their obligations under Canada’s Freedom of Information legislation, our institutions are overburdened and underresourced.

Part of this, of course, has to do with the changing nature of the records institutions now hold. But lack of staff support is also a significant issue. As noted in the article:

They described a system that has been deprived of resources, that struggles to fill staff vacancies and that has not kept pace with the digital age. Canadian freedom of information laws were written at a time when the concept of a “record” did not include e-mails, text messages and Slack conversations. This means that today there are exponentially more records to process, and not enough people to do the work.

These individuals discussed a regime that has little standardization – even ministries within the same government very often have different policies on what can be released – little training for staff and high turnover as a result of burnout and cross-sector poaching.

This is also the first time I have seen an article confront the “dearth of expertise” in the Freedom of Information sector:

Almost all of the FOI co-ordinators who spoke to The Globe said they had no training or experience with access legislation before they were hired. One said she job-shadowed another co-ordinator for a week, although she said this co-ordinator was also inexperienced.

Another co-ordinator, who works in an Ontario ministry, received two weeks of training, which he said is on the high end, from what he has seen. “Everything varies so much from ministry to ministry. It’s really ministry dependent,” he said.

Those who work in the sector say high turnover rates and a lack of training for co-ordinators is a major problem.

And the article included a revelation I found stunning: unable to process requests in-house in a sufficiently timely manner, governments have taken to spending millions on outside consultants to meet the demand:

Unable to manage the load, governments have taken to hiring out millions of dollars worth of freedom of information work, creating a cottage industry of FOI contractors. According to a confidential report that was prepared by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and obtained by The Globe, the federal government has spent $36,207,247 on access to information consultants in the past three years.

This amount is roughly one hundred times the total fees collected by the Federal Government from requestors each year (cited as $367,654 in 2014-2015). (Consider that the next time you hear complaints about requestors being charged too much!)

Questions to Consider

Today’s Globe and Mail article (and the ongoing “Secret Canada” project) presents an opportunity to assess your own Freedom of Information program. Is your institution generally able to respond to requests within 30 days? Are your FOI staff forced to rush through files, potentially leading to errors, missed deadlines, and needless appeals?

What have you done to ensure adequate resourcing for your Freedom of Information function? Have you considered hiring your first full-time FOI and Privacy Coordinator, or expanding your FOI team? Are you paying your experienced FOI professionals what they are worth?

And are you using modern Freedom of Information software to track and process your FOI requests, or are you still doing everything manually? The FOI Assist software not only tracks your deadlines and request status, but it also guides your institution through the FOI process under Ontario’s Freedom of Information legislation. Designed by a lawyer with significant experience in the field, the FOI Assist software serves as an effective training tool for less experienced FOI professionals, while helping your staff work faster and significantly reducing the risk of errors and missed deadlines.

The FOI Assist Software

Adopting the FOI Assist software is perhaps the most cost-effective decision you can make to improve the compliance and responsiveness of your Freedom of Information program. And it takes much of the stress out of running an FOI program as well!

The FOI Assist software is available to all Ontario ministries, agencies, boards, commissions, municipalities, colleges and universities, school boards, police services, hospitals and transportation agencies—any institution that responds to FOI requests under Ontario’s Freedom of Information legislation will benefit.

Book a demonstration today to see what the FOI Assist software can do for your institution.