History: An FOI mystery

Journalists who use freedom-of-information laws to hunt down government records can quickly become overwhelmed with documents. Paper piles grow higher, CD-ROMs get scattered and scratched, big digital files soak up memory. Organization is vital, and can be time-consuming. Scanning paper to digital formats, for example, is labour intensive. Just finding a CD-ROM drive is often a challenge.

Archiving FOI documents, though, is important. The source material is the evidence that backs up a story. It needs to be produced if anyone challenges a claim. Unused sections of documents can sometimes be mined for future stories. Readers will occasionally ask for a copy of the document. I try to accommodate them, if the copying isn’t too onerous, because my reporting should be subject to scrutiny. And given the public money spent processing documents, I feel an obligation to share with fellow citizens.

But my personal archive shouldn’t be the only way to connect with government records.

In 1994, my Canadian Press colleague Alan Jeffers obtained parts of a 2,000-page RCMP Security Service file through the Access to Information Act (ATIA). The heavily redacted material documented the surveillance of black activists in Halifax in the 1970s. In two stories, Jeffers exposed the RCMP’s racist terminologies and attitudes.

Last year, journalist Andrea Conte asked Library and Archives Canada for some of the same records, already processed under the Act. “I was informed that the release package for this file is ‘long gone’,” Conte wrote recently. “Forced to repeat work the Canadian Press did decades ago, I filed an ATIA request for the file in February 2021.” Conte is still waiting for a response.

This ATIA-vetted material on such a shameful episode should itself have been archived, readily available to researchers. It’s all the more frustrating because Canadian governments long ago abandoned the proactive declassification of historical records, a process that used to begin as documents aged beyond the 30-year mark. As Paul Marsden has eloquently explained, the arrival of the Access to Information Act in 1983 upended those sensible protocols.

In 2012, Treasury Board launched a website that seemed a step in the right direction. Citizens could search a database containing summaries of previously released access-to-information packages, and could informally ask for copies of the release packages by citing reference numbers. However, the database purged summaries two years after posting. What’s worse, Library and Archives Canada recommends departments do not retain the release packages beyond two years, and many do not. So the labour and public expense of ATIA processing is lost forever, and researchers like Conte must begin from scratch.

Some non-government entities have tried to fill the gap. The Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project, run by Timothy Sayle and Alan Barnes, attempts to preserve intelligence and security documents obtained through the Act, in a searchable database. FOI expert Stanley Tromp has created a massive, 6,000-item database of summaries of news stories that since 1983 have drawn on ATIA documents. But these noble efforts are piecemeal and struggle for resources.

As an author who uses ATIA documents for book research, I attempted to donate a collection of redacted material to a non-government archive. I was rebuffed. The librarians informed me they do not accept government documents of any kind, because governments do their own archiving. I didn’t know how to begin explaining the problem to them.

Treasury Board says it plans to improve the system, notably by extending beyond two years the retention of summaries of access-to-information requests, though no word on how long. The measure will be pointless, though, if departments aren’t also required to retain the underlying release packages beyond two years. There’s a Public Safety Canada initiative underway to proactively declassify more national security and intelligence records, though this is a narrow subset of all historical records.

In the meantime, it’s left to individual journalists, academics and others to archive ATIA records for posterity, a very thin line of defence against the disappearance of Canada’s history.

March 30, 2022