Deflated

Deep in the Liberal government’s April 7 budget (page 217) there was brief reference to more money for the Privy Council Office’s access to information and privacy (ATIP) unit.

The amount seemed substantial: $7 million a year, to 2027, for a total of $35 million over five years. Given that the ATIP unit now spends $2.3 million each year, almost all of it on salaries, that kind of cash could make a big impact.

PCO, which is the prime minister’s own department, has lately been violating legislated deadlines to respond to access requests. About a third of the requests in 2020-2021, the most recent accounting, were delivered well past the deadlines stipulated by law. Its backlog of requests has also been growing, most of it blamed on COVID-related issues.

The ATIP unit at PCO is of special interest to journalists, because unlike every other major department, the vast majority of access requests it receives come from media. So while media currently file about five per cent of all requests across government, at PCO they account for a whopping 43 per cent. 

I wanted more details about that bare-bones budget item, so I asked PCO. They immediately sent me to Finance Canada, which took 15 days to deliver this single-sentence silliness:

“… this funding will be used by PCO to address the increasing complexity and volume of ATIP requests, where the amount of information requested has also been increasing.”

When I complained, they sent me back to PCO for more information; that is, exactly where I had started. This back-and-forth minimalist bullshit is quite common in Ottawa, though journalists rarely tell you about it.

PCO finally gave me an answer on April 27, three weeks after I had first approached them.

That $35-million pile of cash cited in the budget got much smaller. As it turns out, less than $6.9 million is earmarked for ATIP. The rest is for “horizontal co-ordination,” which sounds like a sex position but is apparently about public servants talking to one another more often.

Some of that $6.9 million goes to providing documents to Parliamentary committees. The rest is to reduce ATIP backlogs by hiring more staff, and not all of them will be posted to ATIP units. That’s the best detail I could get after three long weeks. (And just for the record, that initial one-sentence response from Finance Canada was grossly in error – only a fraction of the $35 million is going to ATIP.)

So one lesson here is that big banner numbers in budgets often get deflated once you poke them.

The other lesson is that extracting information from government officials is a ridiculous waiting game, whether you’re using the Access to Information Act or just asking basic questions about how they plan to spend our money.

April 28, 2022