Treasury Board President Mona Fortier said Tuesday she will share a plan in the coming months for improving the Access to Information Act and how it is managed.
“My current priority is to improve administration of the existing law. We strengthened the act less than four years ago,” Fortier told the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.
“We have a lot of work to do to address the underlying systemic issues. And we will continue to take action to do just that.”
Canada’s Access to Information Act allows for people to request a range of federal documents, such as internal emails, invoices, and briefing notes, for a $5 fee. Federal agencies are supposed to respond within 30 days or provide justifications for why more time is needed to do so.
Fortier said Canada’s Open Government portal contains approximately 37,000 records and 2 million proactive disclosures, with the Global Data Barometer ranking Canada seventh in the world for open data.
The Treasury Board president added that 70.7 percent of requests were completed within the timeframe of law in 2021 and 2022. “I’m not the first to say that this compliance rate is not good enough,” she said.
Fortier said the objectives of the work being done are to improve service delivery, strengthen staff to better meet the needs of Indigenous populations, and continue to develop actions such as declassification. She added that recent initiatives have been undertaken to make the process of submitting and receiving requests more efficient and to address staffing challenges.
Conservative MP Says Access to Information Request System Is ‘Failing’
Conservative MP Damien Kurek told Fortier that every witness that appeared before the committee said Canada’s Access to Information system did not meet appropriate standards. “It’s been eight years, and along with your predecessors in this portfolio, Canada’s Access to Information system is struggling, it’s failing, and it’s causing a loss of confidence in our democratic institutions.”Kurek also referenced testimony from a previous Access to Information officer, who said the Liberal government removed some key performance metrics, which caused “chaos and confusion” in the system. Fortier responded that while most requests were being handled within the required timeframe, there was still “a lot of work to do to make sure that we increase the numbers that we receive.”
“And everyone knows that we have received an increased amount of requests and are trying to deal with the backlog,” Fortier added.
Fortier did not answer Kurek’s question on how many staff are working on Access to Information Requests, but said they are working “very hard” to train staff. She said there is also a “pool of 150 potential candidates that could come and work with us, to make sure that they’re ready to confront the load that we have currently.”
