Hamster wheel

Canada’s information commissioners have complained for years they can’t do their jobs properly without more money.

Investigating citizen complaints about access-to-information requests requires trained staff. And a chronic shortage of cash means they can’t hire enough people for growing piles of work, now at record levels.

So it’s surprising to learn the office has repeatedly failed to spend the money it already has.

Over the last decade, the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada (OIC) has “lapsed” a total of  $6.4 million in funds that Parliament authorized, according to the Public Accounts of Canada.

“Lapsed” is a technical term for the money allocated to an institution’s  budget but not spent by the March 31 fiscal year-end.

In each of the last 10 years, the OIC was unable to spend all of its cash. And the problem has been getting worse in recent years. The annual lapsed amount exceeded $1.5 million in 2017 and in 2020, for example – well over 10 per cent of the budget in each year.

The unspent cash is not necessarily lost forever. Treasury Board allows some lapsed money to be carried forward, usually limited to five per cent of the total departmental budget. Anything in excess of that can be “reprofiled” into a future year, but only after applying for special permission.

Under former commissioner Suzanne Legault (2010-2018), annual lapses averaged about half a million dollars; it’s almost twice that amount under the new commissioner, Caroline Maynard (2018- ). What’s going on?

The Liberal government amended the Access to Information Act in 2019 (Bill C-58), giving the commissioner much more work. In recognition of the increased workload, Parliament approved a permanent $1.3-million increase to the office’s annual budget starting in 2019-2020. The commissioner was also given $2.6 million in one-time funding to reduce complaint backlogs.

“Some of this additional funding wasn’t available before the third quarter of the fiscal year,” said Josee Brouillette of the OIC’s media-relations section. “Because the OIC is a small organization, it was not able to cash-manage the additional funding before the end of the year.”

Brouillette said the office eventually was able either to carry forward or to reprofile the lapsed cash over the following two years. So no money was lost, just delayed.

Except the same thing happened in 2020-21. Another permanent increase in the budget, worth $2.5 million, was only delivered in the third quarter. Because the money was again late in arriving, much of it was lapsed – and the reprofiling exercise began again.

This hamster wheel has been spinning for at least a decade now. Money can’t be spent in time, flips over into the next year, where again it can’t be spent in time. Now the wheel is spinning faster.

In the meantime, the complaints backlog has been growing each year. Citizens have waited up to 10 years or more for resolutions to their complaints about information requests that, by their very nature, are time sensitive.

“This money is more difficult to spend when received late in the fiscal year,” said Brouillette, “as it cannot be used to hire permanent resources or specialized consultants for IT projects, who generally secure employment earlier in the year.”

Maynard recently complained that she is too beholden to the government for her annual budgets, a conflict of interest for an office charged with holding the government to account. She wants her money to come straight from Parliament, rather than being mediated each year through government.

The revolving door of lasped funds is yet another reason a flawed budgeting process needs this permanent fix. Maybe then citizen complaints to the office can begin to be resolved in weeks rather than years.

Nov. 15, 2022