Annual Report: 2002-2003

In the reporting year (2002-2003), 956 complaints were made to the commissioner against government institutions (see Table 1). Table 2 indicates that 1,004 investigations were completed, 16.2 percent of all completed complaints being of delay. Last year, by comparison 28.2 percent of complaints concerned delay. This significant drop in the number of delay complaints is indicative of a generally improving performance by government in meeting response deadlines.

In addition to the complaints received this year, the office responded to 3,157 inquiries.

Resolutions of complaints were achieved without the intervention of the courts in every completed investigation with only two exceptions. Those cases are reported at pages 71 to 73. With the consent of the requesters, they have been brought before the Federal Court for review.

As seen from Table 3, the overall turnaround time for complaint investigations increased to 8.18 months from 7.85 months last year. Parliament was alerted last year to the deterioration in the office's ability to deliver timely investigations due to resource constraints, a heavy burden of complex investigations and difficulty in securing informal cooperation from government institutions. Table 3A illustrates the effect on completion time of the increasing percentage of workload in the more complex, difficult complaint categories.

Table 1 reminds us that there continues to be a troubling number of incomplete investigations. Last year it was 729, this year it is 631. Of this number, 373 have been under investigation for a period which indicates that they are backlogged. Even though progress was made this year in reducing the backlog, it remains at an unacceptable level and effects the completion time of all cases. Some of the progress in reducing the backlog is due to a modest infusion of new resources from Treasury Board. At this writing, the commissioner is endeavouring to convince the Treasury Board that there is some further way to go before his office is adequately resourced to effectively fulfill its mandate.

As can be seen from Table 4, complaints were investigated against 54 government institutions. Some 66 percent of all complaints were made against only ten government institutions. This phenomenon corresponds with the access requests received by government as a whole: a few institutions account for the bulk of all requests.

Of the complaints closed this fiscal year, the top ten "complained against" institutions are:

Being on this list does not necessarily mean that these institutions performed poorly. To better assess "performance", one must look at the number of complaints against each institution which were found to have merit versus the number which were not substantiated.

Nevertheless, if one were to list the "top ten" institutions against whom complaints were made which the commissioner found, in this reporting year, to have merit (resolved or well-founded), the list would be:

Last year, special mention was made of the difficulties being experienced by Citizenship and Immigration Canada in dealing with a large volume of access requests in an efficient manner. Since that report, additional resources and new procedures have been put in place. While Citizenship and Immigration Canada still tops both lists (number of complaints against and number of meritorious complaints against), improved performance is beginning to show. As indicated in the report card results (see pages 139 to 144), the percentage of requests received which are answered late dropped to 3.8 percent for the period April 1 to November 30, 2002. By comparison, last year, the rate was almost 13 percent However, there is also some evidence to be explored in the coming year--that Citizenship and Immigration Canada's improvement may have resulted from an overly liberal use of extensions.