Reporters bailing on FOI?
The news media in Canada appear to be abandoning access-to-information in record numbers.
Annual statistics from Treasury Board, released this week, indicate the media filed just 2.6 per cent of all access-to-information requests in 2021-22.
That’s down sharply from the year before (4.6 per cent), and appears to be an all-time low since the Access to Information Act came into force in 1983.
Peak use by media hit 13.9 per cent in 2013-14, according to Treasury Board, and has been on a long decline ever since.
Gathering and publishing statistics on use of the Access to Information Act is a requirement of the legislation itself, and Treasury Board has dutifully complied each year. But the numbers are somewhat suspect.
For one thing, access requests to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) have distorted the statistics for years. These are requests overwhelmingly made by immigration consultants and lawyers for their clients’ application files. They use the Act because they have no other choice. IRCC won’t update the clients on their applications in any other way. So instead of creating a business system to help these people, IRCC instead chose to dump the problem onto the access-to-information system.
These access requests to IRCC now constitute 80 per cent of all requests received across government institutions, and badly distort the overall picture. In recognition of that distortion, Treasury Board for the first time this year stripped out these IRCC access requests from the annual stats to provide a clearer picture. Unfortunately, they haven’t provided any revised stats from previous years to allow year-to-year comparisons.
Treasury Board in its wisdom has also stopped providing statistical tables showing who is using the Act, whether business, the public, media or other. But they do provide raw data, and that’s how I calculated media use at 2.6 per cent of all requests in 2021-22, which includes that giant block of IRCC requests. (There are caveats: Treasury Board does not define “media” and users self-select their category, so statistical rigor is lacking.)
It’s also possible to compare actual numbers of media requests by year, using the raw data, and here too is a sad story of decline. In 2021-22, Treasury Board counted 5,855 requests coming from media. That’s down sharply from the year previous (6,698) and appears to be the lowest level of the last decade. So no matter how you slice it, reporters seem to be abandoning the Act in droves.
I made this observation recently to a House of Commons committee, days before the latest numbers were released, which confirm the trend. As I indicated to MPs, absurd delays in response times are killing this document-based branch of journalism. Almost 30 per cent of access requests completed in 2021-22 violated legislated deadlines for responses. That’s more than double the level a decade ago. And delays, as we know, particularly target journalists.
My worry is that delays, which serve government interests, have become chronic. And as more journalists give up on the legislation, we are eroding FOI skills in the news business that took many years to build. Indeed, new generations of reporters may not bother.
Dec. 15, 2022
