Delays, delays, delays: a constant for government-information seekers

OTTAWA—Delays for months and years are very commonplace in attempts to get access to government records. Cumbersome and, at times, unnecessary lengthy consultations, creaky under-resourced and rigid administrations, and time privileges granted to corporations all contribute to the maxim, “information delayed is information denied.” That certainly has been the case in recent requests to get to the bottom of government-corporate actions that the powers-to-be prefer to remain secret. My access-to-information request to the City of Ottawa for Rideau Transit Group (RTG) non-compliance reports dealing with their construction difficulties on this $2.1-billion Ottawa light rail transit project has, however, been met with delays. Officials kept extending the time they claimed they needed to consult and prepare the records. Rideau Transit Group, the powerful international consortium in charge of the first stage of the LRT construction, kept asking for, and getting from the City of Ottawa, further extensions. So at the beginning of January, I appealed the City of Ottawa's stalling tactics to the Ontario information commissioner. It didn’t help that another LRT construction incident occurred last November that likely made officials and the contractor nervous about the records I sought. That incident saw three men engaged in spraying concrete on a section of the tunnel wall shaken up after a steel cage designed to provide stability came loose from the tunnel wall. Now, this last week, the Rideau Transit Group has filed an appeal wanting the records withheld and sealed without at this point any public information being available on the specifics of its objectives. That ends any illusion their non-compliance reports submitted to the City of Ottawa will be made public any time soon. It is unclear which specific exemptions are being applied or requested, or whether it is the contractor or the city or both who do not want certain records released on what is the largest-ever Ottawa infrastructure project. As a result, I have continued my appeal to the city's information commissioner. Fighting such lengthy delays are never easy and delays are still the norm, even when you come back with followup requests after previous records are finally disclosed. For instance, I am encountering delays and obstacles in a followup request after reporting in The Hill Times in January, based on Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) access records, that AquaBounty applied pressure in early 2016 to speed up getting its genetically modified salmon eggs tested so that it could get quicker access to foreign countries for production. My second CFIA access request for more details on GM eggs getting fast-track export access has been met with a long 150-day time extension. A promised, small interim release was delayed and not received until late February, and only came after I called the CFIA president's office, where it had been sitting for 43 days. And unlike in the previous CFIA records received, the names of overseas countries where GM salmon eggs were being shipped were blacked out and unnecessarily exempted. Not wanting to leave matters there, I have filed another request asking how many other access requests considered publicity-sensitive went to the CFIA president's office and for how long they sat there and if exemptions were then added. There are many more examples of federal government delays that are poorly handled. Health Canada is one of the most notorious of federal departments, with consistent delays of a year to three years or more in responses. They and other agencies have officers who do nothing but handle dozens upon dozens of backlogged access requests. Part of their job is to try and convince users to drop old requests even if they are on matters like drug and food safety, saving them any efforts to belatedly begin consultations or to see which exemptions they could apply. The delay epidemic extends to the Office of the Information Commissioner, which has backlogs in submitted complaints, some on time delays. One of my complaints took the information commission 10 years to process. The Treasury Board, the very agency responsible for acting on growing delays, is itself sitting on one of my access requests, 14 months later, on what open and transparency actions they were working on at the end of 2015. It has often been suggested time extensions and consultations should be limited and that powers should be given to the information commissioner to restrict the time it takes to respond. This, however, in itself is not the solution to prompt access or lead to systematic quick and widespread pro-active disclosures of government records. Unfortunately, the current government has set a deliberately slow pace. They have put off for another year or two even instituting minor changes to Ottawa's secretive and delay practices and indicated that a more comprehensive statutory parliamentary review of such practices would have to wait until the next decade. Ken Rubin is an access-to-information critic and user reachable at kenrubin.ca. The Hill Times

Delays, delays, delays: a constant for government-information seekers

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Delays, delays, delays: a constant for government-information seekers

Fighting lengthy delays are still the norm when it comes to access-to-information requests from government.

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