Annual Report: 2004-2005

For several years, a number of institutions were subject to review because of evidence of chronic difficulty in meeting response deadlines. In his 1996-97 annual report to Parliament, the former information commissioner reported that delays in responding to access requests had reached crisis proportions.

In 1998, at the beginning of this Information Commissioner’s term, the "report card" system was commenced. Selected departments were graded on the basis of the percentage of the access requests received that were not answered within the statutory deadlines of the Access to Information Act. Under the Act, late answers are deemed to be refusals. Initially, the report cards were tabled in Parliament as specials reports; since the fiscal year 2000-01, they have been included within the commissioner’s annual report.

Since the introduction of the report cards, the Information Commissioner has observed a dramatic reduction in the number of delay complaints: from a high of 49.5 percent in 1998-99 to a low of 14.5 percent of complaints in 2003-04. This year, the delay complaints account for 21.1 percent of our workload. The Office of the Information Commissioner will continue to focus its attention on the delay problem in order to remind government institutions of their responsibilities to provide timely responses to requests.

The Information Commissioner has adopted the following standard as being the best measure of a department’s compliance with response deadlines – percentage of requests received which end as deemed refusals:

In previous years, the deemed-refusal ratio to requests received did not take into consideration those requests carried over from the previous year, nor the number of requests already in a deemed-refusal status on April 1. These figures are taken into consideration in this year’s report.

This year, the Office of the Information Commissioner reviewed the status of requests in a deemed-refusal situation for the following twelve departments: Canada Revenue Agency (CRA); Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC); Correctional Service Canada (CSC); Fisheries and Oceans Canada (F&O); Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT); Health Canada (HCan); Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC); Industry Canada (IC); National Defence (ND); Privy Council Office (PCO); Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC); Transport Canada (TC).

Using the grading scale, the results attained by the twelve government institutions reviewed this year, during the period April 1 to November 30, 2004, are set out in Table 1.

From observing Table 2, five institutions improved their performance over last year, two showed no change and five received lower grades than last year. Congratulations to Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (formerly part of Human Resources Development Canada) for achieving an "A" compared with the "F" received by HRDC last year. A positive effort was noted by Industry Canada, in its second year in the reporting system, going from an "F" to a "D". Of particular concern is the Privy Council Office, which went from an "A" last year to an "F" in this year’s report. National Defence has levelled off at a grade of "B" over the last two years, which is a good report, but the department needs to press ahead to achieve ideal compliance. Correctional Service Canada deserves credit for its ability to maintain a grade "A" in the last two years. Although Fisheries and Oceans Canada narrowly missed getting an "A" this year by 0.2%, it had maintained a grade of "A" for the two previous years.

Table 3 shows how difficult it is to maintain a high performance in meeting legislated timeframes under the Access to Information Act. For example, PCO and DFAIT show a large degree of performance fluctuation over the years. Industry Canada’s progress in the past year is actually more positive than the figures would indicate. A lot of work was done by the department in addressing the many recommendations that were made last year by the Office of the Information Commissioner. Industry Canada is encouraged to continue pressing forward to attain a better performance next year. DFAIT and PWGSC constitute chronic problem cases which are at the top of the commissioner’s list of priorities for attention.

There appear to be five main causes of delay in processing access requests:

• Inadequate resources in ATIP offices;

• Chronic tardiness in the retrieval of records due to poor records management and staff shortages in offices of primary interest (OPIs);

• Difficulties encountered during the consultation process with third parties and other government institutions;

• Top-heavy approval processes, including too much "hand-wringing" over politically sensitive requests and too frequent holdups in ministers’ offices; and

• Poor communications with requesters to clarify access requests.

The complete text of the twelve reviews conducted this year is available on our website at www.infocom.gc.ca.