Here be monsters

Monsters have been terrorizing ATIPtown for years. Now they’ve broken into the police station.

Caroline Maynard, Canada’s information commissioner and sheriff of ATIPtown, said earlier this month that her office had grappled with a monster ATIP request amounting to 33,000 pages.

Maynard polices Canada’s access-to-information system, investigating complaints from requestors about delays and excessive redactions. But her office is also subject to the Access to Information Act, and her staff recently processed a giant request that sucked up a lot of resources.

These monster requests (my phrase) began to appear more frequently starting in May 2016, when the Trudeau government eliminated all processing fees for requests, apart from the $5 application fee. That policy became embedded in law in June 2019.

Users no longer had strong incentives to limit the scope of their requests, because they faced no financial burden. Processing costs now came out of government’s pocket, not their own.

And so began the era of monster requests.

There have been some notorious examples. At Library and Archives Canada, a court case erupted over a request for a 780,000-page archived RCMP file. In 2017-18, the Canada Border Services Agency processed 14.8 million records for a single request. Another federal institution processed almost 15 million records in 2019-20 in response to just three related requests.

The federal government’s database of previously released access-to-information requests, with entries ranging from January 2020 to September 2022, reveals other monsters.

There were 41 requests that each required the processing of more than 10,000 pages, for example. The biggest three were at the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board (five million pages); Treasury Board (515,000 pages); and RCMP (158,000 pages).

Amendments to the Act in 2019 allow departments to disregard a request if they deem it vexatious, made in bad faith or an abuse of the right to make a request – but only with the information commissioner’s approval. The measure was intended as a defense against bad actors. But so far, only three requests have been so rejected. And monster requests don’t automatically qualify for rejection simply because of their size.

Monster requests don’t necessarily mean an onerous processing load for a department. Some requests involve large databases that can be readily prepared and delivered. But most of these giants do seem to be labour intensive.

Maynard, for example, recently investigated a complaint about a five-year extension taken by Public Health Agency of Canada for request that amounted to 30,000 pages of emails, texts, and messages. The agency explained that its FOI officer could process only 500 pages a month, on top of a regular workload. That meant the officer would need to spend half a decade redacting the file. Maynard accepted the explanation, and allowed the extension.

Monster requests can gum up the works in ATIP shops, diverting precious resources away from tightly focused, well-scoped requests. They’re the unwanted byproduct of that 2016 policy change eliminating almost all fees. And now we learn that monster requests have turned up at the doorstep of the information commissioner herself. As I have argued elsewhere, we need an adult conversation about how and when fees are applied, with a view to re-introducing some scoping discipline into the system.

Oct. 12, 2022