Dubious FOI statistics
Each fall, Treasury Board publishes summary statistics on how well or badly the government complied with the Access to Information Act in the previous fiscal year. (The Act requires it.) The latest report, for 2020-2021, was issued three days before Christmas.
Treasury Board’s data are thin and dubious. For example, the stats are massively skewed by Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), which got three-quarters of all ATIA requests last year. Almost all those requests are from immigration lawyers and consultants looking for basic information about their clients’ applications. They don’t choose to file ATIA requests – they’re forced to by IRCC. In its wisdom, the department decided long ago that funneling this routine paperwork through its ATIP shop was better than building a proper business IT system. Last year, 108,000 requests got dumped into the access system that didn’t need to be there.
The report is also supposed to tell us who is using access-to-information, by broad category, whether media, academia, business, etc. But the numbers are also dubious. Users are asked to self-identify, for example, so there’s no quality control. One catch-all category is the “public,” which is never defined. In recent years, more users have declined to provide any category at all.
Treasury Board also collects no data about what content users are requesting. But there’s plenty of data about why they’re denied that content.
For the record, the latest report shows the backlog of unprocessed ATIA requests grew by a third, and on-time delivery of documents dropped 11 per cent. No surprise there. The report coincides with the first full year of COVID, which acted like a wrecking ball in ATIP offices, some of which just turned out the lights. So the statistics may be shoddy, but the trend is genuine.
The rest of the document has few surprises, but there’s one unexpected omission: the section about who uses the Act. User information has been a bedrock element of the annual analysis, but it’s AWOL this year. (I’ve asked Treasury Board for an explanation, and will share any answer.) The raw data, though, is still available in an attached Excel spreadsheet. So as a public service, I’m providing the missing section here, bearing in mind the data is loosey-goosey.
Some 8.6 per cent of users declined to identify their category, the highest level ever. The biggest user, at 44.2 per cent, was business – but again, the number is skewed by all those immigration consultants. The ill-defined “public” comes in at 35.1 per cent; organizations at 4.3; academia at 3.3.
Media users are down to 4.6 per cent. The number has been dropping over many years, from highs of 14 per cent about a decade ago. What’s going on? The easy explanation is that the news business is collapsing, but that’s too pat. One factor is that more media users are declining to identify their category. I always tick the “Decline to identify” box on the request form, on the principle that government has no business asking the question, and I’ve urged the same for other reporters. The drop may also have to do with the June 2019 amendments to the Act, which require more proactive disclosure of a few frequently sought documents. Perhaps reporters are skipping access requests in favour of using these proactive disclosures? I hope not.
The raw data also lets us see which departments are attracting the most media requests. No. 1 is Industry or ISED (at 815 requests); then Finance (773); RCMP (551); ESDC (335) and Global Affairs (266). I suspect Industry and Finance are at the top partly because reporters want inside information about COVID bailouts. But who knows? The data are just too thin and unreliable to say.
Jan. 21, 2022
Postscript: I asked Treasury Board on Jan. 20 why the annual analysis of who uses the Act was dropped in the latest report. Two weeks later, I received this clipped response: The report “was revised to streamline content and focus on key information relating to the performance of the ATI and Privacy programs.”
Feb. 3, 2022
