Chris Selley: Can Quebec’s language vultures not leave hospitals alone, at least? ATIP translation

2024/08/01 Leave a comment

On ATIP, the government should just move to automated translation as it is getting good enough to be used for ATIP. From a client service perspective, would address timeliness, from a government perspective, would address costs:

…In other bilingualism news, journalist Dean Beeby reports that federal official languages commissioner Raymond Théberge has launched an investigation into the CBC proactively posting online its responses to journalists’ access-to-information requests.

That’s an undisputed best practice in the world of access-to-information, a field in which Canada (and the CBC in particular) ranks somewhere below South Sudan and Myanmar: If you’ve released information to one journalist, there’s no earthly reason to make other journalists request it again and go through the whole rigmarole. Just send them a link to the response, or they can find it themselves.

But federal government institutions are required to publish everything in French and English; the CBC’s responses are in English. So now we have a federal appointee considering whether this rare attempt at transparency must be published in both official languages.

That would amount to thousands upon thousands of pages of documents. They absolutely will not be translated. The only practical outcome is not to publish the documents at all. I’m quite sure CBC would be happy with that.

And without getting too melodramatic about it — official bilingualism is totally sustainable, in a rational form — I feel like we’re at a crossroads here. There was a time when Canada was fat and happy enough that doing arguably weird and excessive things in the name of official bilingualism didn’t seem like too much of a burden or a hassle. We had plenty of money, debt-to-GDP was fine, pretty much everyone with a decent job had a decent place to live.

That time is not now. This is a broke and broken country, requiring generations of punishingly expensive fixing — not least on the most basic issue of housing — that actually made a controversy out of children’s medicine delivered to Quebec, during a children’s medicine shortage, on grounds the labels weren’t bilingual.

It’s enough, already. Someone just has to say it: “enough.” But no one with the power to change anything ever, ever will.

Source: Chris Selley: Can Quebec’s language vultures not leave hospitals alone, at least?

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

The Liberals strike a blow for government secrecy

2024/05/25 Leave a comment

Sigh, but so endemic of all governments in undermining ATIP:

…A system predicated on the notion that everything but the most classified government documents and data ought to be public has become a tool for Canadians governments to do what they instinctively do best: hoard information.

Let’s be blunt about why they do this: to keep information out of the hands of citizens, because an informed citizenry is an empowered citizenry. Governments aren’t so much jealously squirreling away information as they are sucking the lifeblood out of the democratic system.

Mr. Trudeau came to power vowing to set a sunny example by making information open by default to all Canadians. Then he discovered what every new prime minister discovers: that the default preference in Canada’s halls of power is to keep voters in the dark.

He could still restore his reputation on this issue. He should allow the independent review of the system and restore the Commissioner’s funding. It’s not too late for the Prime Minister to live up to what are still very good ideals.

Source: The Liberals strike a blow for government secrecy

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Ottawa not sufficiently addressing flood of access requests for immigration records, watchdog says

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

Biting and justified comments:

…While she commends IRCC and CBSA’s efforts to increase the efficiency of their access teams, those measures aren’t enough to stem the tide, and amount to “treating the symptoms” instead of “curing the illness,” Ms. Maynard says in the report.

“It’s frustrating, because I think they do know how to fix it,” Ms. Maynard said in an interview. IRCC’s operations division, responsible for processing immigration applications, “are not doing their part in fixing the root cause,” she said.

“Three years ago, we told them, ‘You have to find a different way to provide that information. You have to fix your system, you have to increase the amount of information that’s provided to new applicants.’ They said they would do it. But, as you can see in the report, it’s now three years later and it still hasn’t been fixed.”…

Source: Ottawa not sufficiently addressing flood of access requests for immigration records, watchdog says

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Cappe and Mitchell: Fixing Canada’s access to information regime will require more than just people power

2023/06/26 Leave a comment

Starts with changing the default to being open, as open data illustrates. But the reality that politicians tend to support more open government when in opposition and be “less enthusiastic” when in government is likely the fundamental obstacle. But modernizing the process and digitizing holdings should be doable:

The Globe and Mail has done Canadians a service by exposing the serious shortcomings in federal and provincial freedom of information (FOI) regimes. The reporting done as part of the Secret Canada project has shown that Canadians cannot get timely access to the information held by governments that they need, and to which they are legally entitled. Either the governments are egregiously slow in responding to access requests or, in far too many cases, they simply fail to provide the information requested. These delays are not simply frustrating; in far too many cases, they affect the material interests of Canadians who need to know what the government knows about them.

This problem is an important challenge to democratic governance in this country. But the solutions may not be obvious.

For example, simply adding more people, working millions more hours, to beleaguered access/FOI units in the federal and provincial governments will not solve the problem. Moreover, our Westminster system of government differs in fundamental ways from the municipal-government-style model with which most Canadians are familiar: Westminster government is cabinet government, where there is a fundamental requirement for secrecy to enable frank discussion among ministers and collective responsibility before the legislature, while municipal councils do their business in the open, as they should. But the obligations of openness differ in important ways between these two forms of government, and this can cause confusion.

To figure out solutions, we must understand the source of our access/FOI problem – and that lies with two fundamental features of the current regimes operated by both the federal and provincial governments.

First, the system we have is governed by the assumption that documents belong to government and are protected unless they can be allowed to be released. The result is that officials are obliged to spend an enormous amount of expensive time examining and redacting documents to protect information that, frankly, has no need of protection. Instead, governments should accept that the information they hold is inherently public, unless it falls within a limited set of exceptions to that rule, and make this information easy to access for citizens.

The second and more fundamental problem is that the laws were written, and governments are operating, in an analog world of paper and paper-based processes, while the needs and expectations of citizens reflect their experiences in a 21st-century digital world.

Today, people expect that information will be available instantly online. The notion that the information that someone is seeking from government is sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere in a remote government building seems laughable – but sadly, it is accurate. The fact is that today, a request for information is, in most cases, actually a request for a paper document that must be located then examined by a government official, then perhaps redacted in some way or other, and then physically transmitted to the person who made the access request. That process takes a huge amount of time and effort, and what’s more, it’s expensive: A recent Treasury Board study revealed that the estimated per-page cost of a document released under the federal access to information program is $11.40, and pegs the total cost to administer the program at $195-million a year. Pro-active disclosure, by contrast, would cost a federal department or agency only $64,000 a year on average.

To solve the problem, we should first recognize a clear distinction between information that should be accessible – namely, almost all of it – and information that, for good reason, should be protected.

We should also recognize that different kinds of information require different forms of protection. Tax data require privacy protection, for instance; this is an essential obligation of government to citizens and is fundamental to our “self-reporting” system of tax collection. Discussions in cabinet and advice to ministers need protection to enable the giving of frank advice and to allow for candour around the cabinet table. National security and intelligence records need protection to protect the security of the country; commercial negotiations, as well as federal-provincial and international negotiations, require protection so as to protect individual and national interests.

All these protections should be pretty much absolute. After that, one can apply a harm test to protect the information, if that is necessary. Otherwise, the default position should be that the information held by governments is readily accessible.

Furthermore, in our digital world, not every digital artifact in government should be deemed a “record” for the purposes of access to information. For example, every e-mail and every telephone call inside government is currently regarded, in principle, as a digital record. These should not be considered a record, for the purposes of the Act. Why not? Well, not every request for access is benign; some requests are motivated, quite legitimately, by a political or journalistic interest in simply embarrassing the government or finding information on a competitor. And if all exchanges among public servants were made public, then people simply would not communicate digitally any more. If casual exchanges among public servants are to be accessible then fear of embarrassing the government or themselves would be a chill on frank exchanges.

So how can we best reform the access/FOI regime at the federal or provincial level to better respect the rights and expectations of citizens, while still protecting the legitimate interests of individuals, governments and the country?

Firstly, as noted, start by recognizing the principles of confidentiality of ministerial discussions that underpin Westminster parliamentary democracy.

Secondly, change the default position for access/FOI from one of protecting secrecy to that of making records releasable unless this would violate clearly defined principles of secrecy or privacy. In cases of doubt, apply a clearly defined justiciable harm test for disclosure.

Thirdly, set out well-defined categories of protected documents (e.g., cabinet confidences, national security and intelligence information, and tax information and other records protected by privacy concerns) in the law.

And finally – and perhaps most importantly – begin the essential task of changing the information holdings of government from analog to digital, and amend search and disclosure processes in the same manner. Emphasize the creation of searchable databases which allow for low compliance costs in government and what is equally important, low private search costs. Recognize the social and public costs of compliance in government (high) vs. the private costs of private search of public records (low).

The Globe is right – the system is broken. Canadians are not being well-served. But we can’t fix the system by simply opening it up. We must understand why it’s broken and what it should look like in future if the interests of Canadians are to be protected.

Mel Cappe is a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former clerk of the Privy Council. James Mitchell is an adjunct professor at Carleton University and a former assistant secretary to the Cabinet, Machinery of Government.

Source: Fixing Canada’s access to information regime will require more than just people power

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Canada’s immigration system is overwhelmed with information requests. Ottawa was warned – but did nothing

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

Well worth reading given depth of analysis and extent of problem:

A few months into his job, Michael Olsen realized he had a problem.

As director-general of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s access to information division from 2014 to 2018, he was in charge of the teams collecting public servants’ e-mails, reports, presentations, memos and other documents in response to access requests. It was delicate work. Mr. Olsen likes to joke he was the most hated man in the entire department.

A worrying trend had emerged: The number of access requests to IRCC was growing – and that growth was accelerating. “Volumes were always higher,” Mr. Olsen said. “They were never coming down.”

Under the federal Access to Information Act, people can force the government to disclose records that would otherwise be inaccessible. This legal mechanism is intended to promote transparency and act as a check on power. In practice, using it means filling out an online form, paying a $5 fee, then waiting for documents to arrive. (In other jurisdictions, these are often called freedom of information requests.)

Roughly a decade ago, lawyers, consultants and individuals realized they could better navigate the immigration system by using access legislation. IRCC ordinarily provides immigration applicants with minimal information during the process; if their cases run into problems, they often have no easy way of finding out why. But the department is required to respond to access requests, and its answers can reveal why cases have been rejected or become stuck in abeyance.

This meant Mr. Olsen’s office was gradually being turned into an immigration case file retrieval-and-delivery operation.

He began warning his superiors. Each year, he gave presentations to senior management – the deputy minister, as well as their associates and assistants, who together make up the top public servants overseeing Canada’s immigration system – showing the blistering pace at which access requests were being filed.

“It looks like we’re going to hit a wall in three years,” he cautioned them in 2015. (That year, IRCC received 34,066 access requests.) A year later: “It looks like we’re going to hit a wall in two years.” (41,660 requests.) Twelve months later: “We’re going to hit a wall next year.” (50,728.) “I didn’t beat my shoe on the table or anything like that,” Mr. Olsen recalled. “I did say, ‘You can see the projections as well as I can.’” But changes that might have addressed the torrent of requests never came.

Eventually, IRCC hit that wall.

Over a decade, IRCC has seen a 763-per-cent increase in access requests, from roughly 20,000 in the fiscal year ending March, 2012, to about 177,000 in the 2022 fiscal year. The influx of filings has become so overwhelming that IRCC now accounts for 80 per cent of all access requests made to the federal government.

That onslaught will only worsen. Last year, the government announced it was aiming to admit a record 500,000 new permanent residents a year by 2025. (To put that number in perspective, in 2019 Canada admitted 341,000 permanent residents.) This would be in addition to the millions of permits, visas and authorizations issued each year to workers, students and visitors.

As IRCC strives to meet its aggressive new targets, critics and insiders say the department first needs to tame how it interacts with the access to information system, a relationship that has morphed into something beyond its control – bogging down its internal processes, costing taxpayers money and giving rise to a cottage industry of experts who flood the system with requests.

The volume of requests the department receives has also begun affecting areas outside immigration. IRCC’s ever-increasing appetite for access staff is straining an already limited pool of experts within the government, and a majority of federal access disputes handled by the Office of the Information Commissioner are now related to immigration requests. Other departments involved in immigration matters, such as the federal border agency, are also now facing higher request volumes.

In effect, the federal access to information system, which is supposed to hold the entire government to account, has been hijacked by the immigration system. Faced with an unending stream of requests, IRCC’s leadership – including several successive immigration ministers – have been slow to address the root causes of the deluge now threatening Canada’s immigration and access systems, according to internal government records obtained through access requests and interviews with more than 20 experts.

This is made all the more puzzling by the fact that IRCC has known of a potential solution for years, one that has been championed by many current and former public servants: Give applicants as much of their case files as possible without requiring access requests.

“I think you could say that there was a problem,” said Mr. Olsen, who retired in late 2018. “It was identified. Sadly, not enough has been done yet to address that problem.”

In a statement, IRCC spokesperson Rémi Larivière said the department “is striving to implement initiatives that will address the root causes of the increase in access requests and corresponding complaints.”

During any immigration process, applicants submit forms and supporting documentation, which are then reviewed by case officers. Often, those officers will need additional information, such as a security assessment from a different government department or additional banking information, before a case can proceed. This can put an application on hold for months – or years. In other instances, officers may not be satisfied by an applicant’s submission, and may issue a formal refusal letter.

IRCC’s communications with applicants are brief. If a file is on hold, there could be no correspondence whatsoever; if a file is rejected, the refusal letter may only include a sentence or two about why the application did not succeed.

In nearly every access request made to the department, the same database is searched: the Global Case Management System, IRCC’s bespoke immigration software. GCMS is the beating heart of Canadian immigration. The system stores submitted documents, tracks correspondence between IRCC and applicants and logs case officers’ comments.

These “GCMS notes,” as experts call them, are all drearily similar. They’re a lengthy list of application details, as if all the fields on a government form were unceremoniously dumped, line after line, into a document dozens of pages long. The most important information usually lies in the cryptic write-ups from case officers, which note status updates and issues with applications, such as missing documents.

GCMS, painstakingly built over many years to streamline operations, wasn’t designed to give people direct access to their case files. Applicants, lawyers and consultants, hungry for any information that would tell them what they needed to know to get a file moving again – or explain in detail why an application was rejected – realized these files were subject to federal access law. The requests poured in.

In 2021, 99 per cent of all the requests IRCC received were for immigration case files, according to an internal memo to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser. (The other 1 per cent of requests were for what the department refers to as “corporate records,” such as internal correspondence, communications, presentations – policy-oriented documents often requested by researchers, businesses and the media.)

To Robert Orr, assistant deputy minister of operations at IRCC from 2012 to 2017 and the person ultimately responsible for immigration processing, the department’s hands appeared to be tied as the number of immigration applications grew.

“Once we got into big volumes of applications, we had a choice: We either communicate with applicants about what’s happening, or we get on and process applications,” he said. “And so we were choosing the latter.”

“It had taken so long to develop GCMS that I was a bit reluctant from an operations point of view to start over, doing something that was new,” Mr. Orr continued. “We recognized the importance of giving as much information to people as we could, but we were struggling with the best way to do it.”

As director-general of access to information at IRCC, Mr. Olsen did not have the power to do anything about how much information was pre-emptively shared with prospective immigrants. Instead, he focused on wringing as much efficiency out of IRCC’s access process as he could. But those measures only went so far.

Access work at IRCC can be gruelling. In 2022, when the department received about 177,000 access requests, it had the equivalent of 122 full-time access employees, according to data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. That’s roughly 1,460 files per person.

Ultimately, the issues that plague IRCC’s access unit come from outside – from a community of immigration professionals and applicants who have been unintentionally incentivized by IRCC to file access requests. Another issue is GCMS, an intricate and stubborn piece of software that is difficult to modify and more than a decade old.

There’s also a problem of political will.

“There’s immigration, and then there’s [access requests] about immigration,” Mr. Olsen said. “If a politician has to choose what to get right, what are they going to choose?”

“I think it’s fair to say that people had recognized the limitations of GCMS long before I left the department,” he continued. “But that’s a really big, really expensive item to throw at the government.”

Through his spokesperson, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser declined The Globe and Mail’s requests for an interview.

Manmeet Rai’s access to information empire began on an online forum.

In 2016, Mr. Rai, who had recently graduated from law school in the United States, was attempting to immigrate to Canada. He prepared and submitted the paperwork himself – given his legal background, he didn’t see the need to hire a lawyer or consultant. Months passed without an answer from IRCC.

Frustrated, he learned from an online immigration forum that an access request for his GCMS notes might tell him what he needed to know to get his file moving again. But there was a snag: Only citizens, permanent residents and other individuals or corporations currently in Canada are eligible to file federal access requests. Mr. Rai was none of these.

He found an online service that could serve as his proxy. It filed the request on his behalf and sent him the documents once they were available. He recalls it costing US$25, or $34, much more than the $5 fee charged by the government.

Mr. Rai, who had taken to helping others on that same forum, saw the growing demand for GCMS notes, so he created his own request-proxying service, GetGCMS.com. The site could process credit cards that weren’t enabled for international charges, which are common in India.

“This was not my full-time job,” Mr. Rai told The Globe. “I was just doing it initially as a hobby. And then it just blew up big time.”

Business was good. Within a few years, he was handling anywhere from 5,000 to 9,000 access requests annually. During one “blockbuster” year, he said, GetGCMS took in more than $150,000 in revenue, before expenses. (Mr. Rai, now a Crown prosecutor in Saskatchewan, has since stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the business. GetGCMS is run by his partner.)

GetGCMS charges $20 to obtain the basic notes stored in GCMS about an applicant. More detailed access requests cost as much as $75. In other words, at a minimum, the site is charging people four times more than what they would pay if they filed these requests themselves. And it has recently become possible for anyone – including non-citizens and non-permanent residents outside Canada – to file these requests for free, under a separate federal law called the Privacy Act.

“If you ethically ask me, should I be charging them $20 for something that they can do for free? Well, yes, they can do it for free,” Mr. Rai admitted. “But the thing is, you can file your immigration application or your visa application yourself and just pay $100, right? You don’t have to go down to a lawyer, or you don’t have to go down to a consultant and engage their services.”

In Mr. Rai’s experience, most people using the service don’t want to bother learning how to use the access system. To them, the premium charged by GetGCMS is worth it – and a pittance compared with what a lawyer or immigration consultant might charge for an access request, to say nothing of IRCC’s own filing fees. (A permanent resident application usually costs more than $1,000.)

Over the years, other businesses offering request-proxying services for immigration applicants have popped up, and these services have become a thorn in IRCC’s side. Immigration lawyers and consultants have also taken to automatically filing access requests on their clients’ behalf. (The Globe filed an access request to IRCC in September for data that could quantify the volume of filings coming from organizations like GetGCMS. The department’s reply to that request is now about eight months overdue.)

Mr. Rai said his e-mails to IRCC’s access unit would go unanswered, forcing him to file formal complaints to the Office of the Information Commissioner, the federal organization responsible for handling access disputes. “[IRCC] thought that I was just there to mint money,” he said. “I initially felt bad. I don’t feel bad now.”

Around 2018, Mr. Rai noticed requests were taking longer to be completed, and that the government was more often missing its legal deadlines. He and otherscomplained about these delays, too. A year later, he realized IRCC was claiming 90-day extensions on all new requests coming from GetGCMS. Internal IRCC e-mails Mr. Rai obtained through access requests show the department singled out him and four other so-called “bulk requesters” for these automatic extensions. The dispute was resolved only after the Office of the Information Commissioner stepped in and told the government the pre-emptive extensions were “inconsistent” with the law.

Because of all these new complaints, the commissioner’s office has found itself facing a surge of new work. In the 2022-23 fiscal year, 63 per cent of all federal access complaints were regarding IRCC.

In an ideal world, Mr. Rai said, he would be put out of business by the government. Prospective immigrants looking for information on their applications shouldn’t have to file requests, he argued. “It is a waste of time, resources, money. The government’s spending so much money on hiring people, processing these access requests,” he said. “I have maintained this position for many years.”

“We can shut down and be happy.”

The deluge of access requests at IRCC will almost certainly get worse over the next few years, in part because of a quiet policy change that threatens IRCC’s access system with collapse.

Since July, 2022, a new federal regulation has allowed anyone in the world to file a personal information request under the Privacy Act to the federal government. These requests work almost identically to access requests, but apply only to information a government body holds about the requester. Crucially, these requests carry no fees, meaning that since 2022 all immigration applicants have been able to request their own files for free. (Most aren’t aware of this, or prefer to offload the work to lawyers, consultants or businesses like GetGCMS.)

An internal IRCC memo from 2021 attempted to game out the consequences of different rates of growth in the numbers of requests under this new regime, and the increases in work for access officers that might result. The projections were alarming: The memo said that if one out of every 20 immigration applicants were to file requests, the department would receive around 332,000 filings in the fiscal year ending March, 2023. If one in five people exercised these new rights, that number would be roughly 706,000. The memo did not say whether the department considered either of these scenarios likely to occur, and IRCC has not yet disclosed its 2023 request volumes. In 2022, the department received more than 26,000 privacy requests, in addition to the roughly 177,000 requests it received under access legislation.

In the one-in-five scenario, accounting for current request growth rates, IRCC would be facing 926,000 requests a year by March, 2024. The rest of the federal government combined saw about 113,000 access and privacy requests in the 2022 fiscal year.

That amount of requests to IRCC would grind the federal access system to a halt.

The most valuable resources in any access system are the staff members who process requests. At the federal level, access units have struggled to hire and retain people, and it has become common for departments to poach each others’ workers.

During an appearance before the House of Commons access to information committee earlier this year, Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard warned that IRCC’s ravenous demand for staff would constrain the labour market for access experts. “If you’re going to give more information through access requests, you clearly need to have more people working in access units,” she said.

A sharp increase in requests would also carry more direct costs to taxpayers. According to statistics from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, IRCC spent a total of $10.9-million in 2022 to handle a combined 204,000 access and privacy requests, more than double what it spent in 2012. It also spent $475,000 on two contracts to LRO Staffing, an employment agency, between 2019 and 2022. The company handled more than 2,300 requests, according to a document tabled in the House of Commons. If IRCC’s access volumes were to swell further, itsbudget would also need to grow considerably.

While the department receives the bulk of federal requests, some of those require consultation with other government institutions, such as the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which are now also facing surges.

Many of those requests also trigger complaints to the Office of the Information Commissioner (which adjudicates requests made under the Access to Information Act) or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (which handles requests under the Privacy Act). If volumes increased, both offices would have to direct more staff and funds to immigration-related complaints, reducing the resources available to other requesters, including academics, activists, journalists and the general public. (The Information Commissioner is currently investigating the Canada Border Services Agency as a result of increasing immigration-related access complaints.)

IRCC has announced plans to update GCMS, part of what it calls its “Digital Platform Modernization” project. This would give applicants a greater understanding of their place in the application queue, and more detailed refusal reasons. But those changes are years away, according to Andrew Koltun, an Ontario-based immigration lawyer at LJD Law who researches IRCC’s access to information processes.

While the department has built some public-facing services that share information about the status of an applicant’s file, Mr. Koltun said these tools aren’t very detailed. “I would say that Domino’s Pizza Tracker, when you make a delivery order, is far more detailed in tracking status than IRCC’s trackers are,” he said.

There are other ways of tracking a file’s status. If an applicant is in Canada, they can call an IRCC call centre, where agents are able to look up a GCMS file and read it over the phone. But those calls were answered only 19 per cent of the time in 2021, according to an internal memo. The department’s service standards say the answer rate should be at least 50 per cent.

Mr. Koltun believes applicants should have nearly full access to their GCMS files. “I love the idea that you should have access to your default GCMS notes,” he said. “I think there would be a lot of institutional pressure that would make sure that never happened.”

In part, this comes down to IRCC’s own risk policy, which “is very protective in saying an applicant should never learn anything about the system, because the more someone learns about how the system works, the more likely it is that someone will be able to manipulate this to gain an immigration benefit,” Mr. Koltun said.

The fact that IRCC is now receiving as many requests as it does “speaks to a lack of transparency that immigration applicants face throughout the system,” he said, “and speaks to a paternalism from IRCC that you’re not owed anything as an applicant.”

With updates to GCMS trickling in over the next several years, the department has no choice but to try to curb the demand for access requests, either by improving applicants’ access to documents, thus eliminating the need for requests, or by restricting who can file them in the first place.

In 2020, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, which is responsible for overseeing the administration of federal access law, solicited submissions from various departments as part of a review of government access policies. IRCC’s submission, disclosed by the Treasury Board in response to an access request, asked for limits on who is able to file requests, and the ability to put requests on hold indefinitely during “exceptional circumstances” (the submission noted the pandemic as an example). It also asked that the access filing fee (currently $5 across the government) be set at the discretion of institution heads, and that deadlines be calculated using business days instead of calendar days, which would give IRCC more time to respond.

In part, the submission was a direct response to the internet services filing access requests on behalf of applicants, like GetGCMS. “We would like to see the ATIA reform address the issue of representatives using the Access to Information system for their own personal benefit,” the submission said.

To Mr. Koltun, IRCC’s submission was a cry for help, but the changes it proposed would ultimately mean constraining people’s rights.

“I don’t think anyone sat back and said, ‘Okay, if this is what the system is, what does this mean from a requester perspective?,” Mr. Koltun said. “What does this do to the democratic notion of a right to access?”

In April, 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Treasury Board held a “business resumption” conference call, hoping to get stalled access units back to processing requests in a new era of remote work.

During the meeting, managers shared their approaches, according to meeting minutes released through an access request. Some organizations had begun sending documents via e-mail. Others, including IRCC, were putting requests on hold indefinitely. Audrey White, then the head of IRCC’s access unit, spoke bluntly: The department’s mandate was to process immigration files – not access requests.

Today, it is clear that access to information is as much a part of the immigration system as border agents and background checks. When the federal access to information system was established 40 years ago, legislators did not intend for this to happen – and yet it has.

In 2021, Ms. Maynard, the Information Commissioner, published a detailed investigation into IRCC’s access woes, which laid out a series of recommendations. Chief among them was the idea that applicants’ files should be available without access requests. “Imagine if you had to ask, through an access request, for information about your taxes,” Ms. Maynard told the House access committee earlier this year. “You don’t have to, because you have a portal where you can go and see your information.”

Despite a commitment to change from Marco Mendicino, who was immigration minister until 2021, the department “has yet to offer applicants any alternative methods to access the information they are seeking on their immigration files,” according to Ms. Maynard’s latest annual report, published earlier this week.

In response, Mr. Larivière, the IRCC spokesperson, said the department believes it is on track to resolve these issues, but did not provide further detail.

Even Alec Attfield, a public servant who was until recently in charge of IRCC’s citizenship program, said it is time to take pressure off the system by making case files accessible without formal access requests – and he said the federal government’s ambitious immigration targets are in jeopardy if the status quo persists.

Mr. Attfield, who was the director-general of citizenship at IRCC from 2016 to the end of 2021, said that while information is already obtainable through access to information requests, that access is slow and burdening the department.

“Clients should have access to their case files, their written notes,” he said, with exceptions for information that might affect national security. “Until you have the proper information systems in place, growing immigration volumes are going to put further pressure on access to information and our ability to respond to people’s requests for status on their files. It’s just a fundamental thing.”

It’s still unclear when – or if – IRCC will get to a point where it gives applicants all the information they need, without them having to resort to access requests. Until then, immigration will be restrained by the access to information system.

“Canada is keen to grow its immigration levels,” Mr. Attfield said. “Without a proper system, we won’t be able to achieve those targets.”

In the meantime, the current system is having real-world consequences.

Sunkar Shagambayev, a 32-year-old immigrant from Kazakhstan, came to Canada in 2019 with his wife, Sitora, and their son, Alan. They’re a strikingly handsome family, with photos proudly displayed on the walls of their home in Tillsonburg, Ont. Those pictures depict a fourth person: Sabika, their adopted daughter, whose immigration file has been stuck in bureaucratic limbo since 2020. Each time the Shagambayevs have filed for a permit that would allow Sabika, 14, to enter the country, they have been rejected.

Mr. Shagambayev is unable to get a straight answer as to why the federal government has repeatedly denied the teenager’s study permit. “They’re very vague,” he said. “They never tell you what the real reason is.” The rest of the family have had similar troubles: Their permanent residence applications, first submitted in early 2020, have yet to be approved or rejected. Deeply frustrated by the lack of information from IRCC, Mr. Shagambayev has taken to filing access requests – he’s up to nine so far.

Last week, after prodding IRCC through his lawyer, Mr. Shagambayev received a call from a case officer, who said his file had begun moving again.

The process has taken a mental toll. “I had problems with sleep,” he said. “For maybe two years, I was waking up at night and I was thinking about it, like, ‘What can I do? What can be done in order to speed up the process?’”

“We came to Canada because we thought that the Canadian immigration system was transparent, tolerant and equal,” Mr. Shagambayev said. “This really made us feel like we’re not needed in Canada, not welcomed, like nobody wants us here, even though there are all these shiny slogans about how we need immigration to fuel our work force and economy.”

“But I love this country anyway, because every time I leave Canada and come back, I feel like I’m home.”

Source: Canada’s immigration system is overwhelmed with information requests. Ottawa was warned – but did nothing

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Proudfoot: The Trudeau government was supposed to be ‘open by default.’ Open at all, ever, would be a nice start

2023/04/24 Leave a comment

Hard not to agree:

In its youth, the Trudeau government was very good at branding and grand mission statements. It was a skill that was slightly hypnotizing for its novelty at the time. If the Harper government’s instinct was to turn the hose on any kids it found playing on its lawn, then the Trudeau government promised to fling open the front door and offer a rap session over a nice cool glass of lemonade.

In an open letter to Canadians on the day his first cabinet was sworn in, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to “set a higher bar for openness and transparency” in Ottawa. “Government and its information must be open by default,” he wrote. “Simply put, it is time to shine more light on government to make sure it remains focused on the people it was created to serve – you.”

You could practically hear the “Open by default” banners fluttering nobly atop the Peace Tower.

The problem with having a flair for gleaming manifestoes is that they tend to stick in the mind. And then they follow you around like a hapless tuba soundtrack, reminding everyone of what you once proudly advertised, what you now are and the distance between the two.

At this point, the Liberals’ open-by-default declarations register as cruel farce. They didn’t start the practice of iron-fisted information control in government, but they sure haven’t ended it. And they’re the ones who made that a central feature of who they would be.

There are big-picture obfuscations that deserve correspondingly large derision, like refusing to say how much public money they spent wooing Volkswagen to make car batteries in Canada (a lot, as it turns out) or the government’s obstinance on Beijing poking its fingers into Canadian life.

But it’s the smaller, daily roadblocks that are perhaps more insulting and corrosive, because they seem so unnecessary and because they send the constant message that public information is meted out on a need-to-know basis, and the public needs to know a lot less than it thinks it does.

If journalists, being annoying and nosy on behalf of citizens, have a question for a federal government department, talking to a live human being who knows things about the thing you want to know is an adorable fantasy most of the time. This will usually be conveyed by the delicate euphemism that an interview request “cannot be accommodated.” This sounds like parenting books that advise you to tell a recalcitrant toddler “It’s time to get ready for bed now” because it’s harder to argue with something decreed by the universe than with a person who tells you they’ve made a decision.

Once the absurd idea of an interview is waved off, you are asked to submit questions for response by e-mail, and to state your deadline. This is where the whole thing devolves into play acting.

If you get responses by deadline, they will generally be “answers” to what you asked only in the geographical sense that they will be located below each of your questions. They will otherwise bear, at best, a one-night-stand relationship to the original queries or to anything resembling a clear thought or fact. They will be so obviously, transparently workshopped to death by an unseen army of staffers and bureaucrats that you will practically be able to see the sweaty, nervous fingerprints still steaming on them.

But sometimes – seemingly increasingly – you will not get even an overcooked pablum of words by the stated deadline. At least one federal department now responds to deadline requests by asserting that it has “a two-day service standard,” which is as good as refusing to answer. Others have taken to blowing through a deadline, then asking that a story that has already been published be “updated” or reprinted to include their day-late-and-a-dollar-short response. (No, but that is an impressive level of chutzpah you have there.)

It’s important to note that not every department or minister’s office does this. It’s also important to acknowledge that in terms of populations whining about their working conditions, journalists rank somewhere between scary birthday clowns and subway rats on most people’s scale of who’s worth tuning up the tiny violin for.

But the real problem that underlies all of this is the concept of who owns the information. It’s not the government’s to hoard, or for bureaucratic bouncers to jealously guard. It doesn’t even belong to the journalists asking a bunch of rude questions. The information is owned by the Canadian public, and owed to them as the ones who foot the bill and who will conduct the job interview next time there’s an election call.

That’s the principled argument, but if that’s too sanctimonious for you, there’s a much more mercenary one to be made for the government explaining itself on the regular: it’s self-defeatingly dumb not to.

The logic of withholding public information might be risk aversion or issues management or the peevish certainty that everything is torqued to death and no one gives a fair benefit of the doubt. None of those problems is improved by a refusal to explain yourself, and pretty much all of them are exacerbated by refusing to do so.

When you write an exam, sometimes you arrive at the wrong answer to the big question at the end of the paper. But everyone knows you only get partial credit for trying if you show your work.

Source: The Trudeau government was supposed to be ‘open by default.’ Open at all, ever, would be a nice start

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Sears: Government secrecy hides corruption and covers for the incompetent. Why do we still allow it?

2022/12/20 Leave a comment

Good question. Imagine one of the reasons is the fear that media and others may focus more on the “gotcha” quote rather than a deeper read to understand more comprehensively the issues and interests at stake. That being said, I agree that the default should be openness, not the current opacity and delay.

Wonder if that was his position more than 30 years ago when working as Chief of Staff to then Ontario Premier Bob Rae:

Imagine living in a democracy where open access to everything politicians and governments say and do is automatically made public. Where everyone in public service knows that documents are public, unless you can make a persuasive case that a specific file impacts national security or personal privacy, among a short list of exemptions.

A fairy tale? No, Sweden. They’ve governed this way for well over 200 years, ever since King Gustav III staged a coup d’etat and instituted open government in the 18th century, as a means of revealing corruption in Parliament and the judiciary. Today, all Nordic countries have similar commitments to the importance of accessing information.

But this is Canada, where it seems every week we have another minister or official caught in a coverup. Recently, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc were almost insolent in their testimony before a parliamentary committee examining why the government had not investigated reports of political bribery by China. As Global News reports, LeBlanc “could not disclose whether he has been informed of ‘specific cases,’” while Joly “reiterated that both she and (Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau were not provided specific information.”

This leaves Canadians with a very unpleasant binary choice: either they are not telling truth, or they are. The latter option begs the more worrying question: why were they not briefed?

Our performance on access to information would be laughable, if it were not so dangerous. One witness, a frustrated information seeker, claimed he had been told the delay in meeting his request would take up to 80 years. Needless to say, when decision-making is done in secret, we do not get better government.

The “Freedom Convoy” inquiry has already revealed the cost of government secrecy. That shambolic, finger-pointing circus showed Canadians in painful detail the efforts by many officials to hide information and pass the buck.

Then the inquiry into the failure of Ottawa’s LRT reported that former mayor Jim Watson and senior staff had been economical with the truth, hiding dozens of serious warning signals about the project. Another failure in secret.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith attempted to legislate a defenestration of Parliament and to govern by decree whenever she chose — an astonishing proposition also brewed in secret. The firestorm caused her to relent within days.

Finally, there was the clandestine decision by Ontario Premier Doug Ford to slice off chunks of the Greenbelt for developers, something he had pledged never to do. He reportedly had Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark meeting in secret with those same developers, which Clark denies. Ford must pray no one involved is revealed to have broken bread with him; those same developers had given tens of thousands of dollars to Ford in recent years.

As Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said, it “doesn’t pass the smell test” that developers would buy huge amounts of “permanently protected” Greenbelt land if they had not been tipped off. Secrecy encourages bad behaviour in private, too.

Our access-to-information programs have become a laughing stock, with years-long delays and costs to the citizen sometimes reaching thousands of dollars. For decades, bureaucrats and their ministers have told Parliament that a “lack of resources” is too blame. Really? Is that why the time taken to respond to each request is going up, and the percentage of requests fulfilled is going down?

Government secrecy produces bad government; gives a pass to the incompetent; encourages corruption in procurement; and enables legislation tilted to favour the rich, powerful and connected. As voters, we have rarely made loud demands that promises on freedom of information be honoured. Generations of politicians have lied about their commitments to “open government,” only to slide into deepened secrecy when in power.

It’s time we made it clear to the political class and our public servants that there will be consequences for those frustrating access to information. Sweden pointed the way centuries ago.

Source: Government secrecy hides corruption and covers for the incompetent. Why do we still allow it?

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Improving record keeping crucial to open government, says former head of federal public service

2022/12/14 Leave a comment

Interesting comments by Wernick. Has been a long-time problem and I remember a number of initiatives and programs to address these problems during my time in government with limited success. Not an easy problem to solve given the vast amount of government information holdings:

The former head of the federal public service says neglect and underinvestment in recordkeeping is undermining the government’s “lofty language” about its commitment to open government, and making it harder to locate documents people ask for under access-to-information law.

Michael Wernick says the government’s archives resemble a scene out of an Indiana Jones movie, with boxes and boxes of records waiting to be scanned, sorted and organized.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, he said “the language of open government” … is built on “a very shaky foundation” because of a lack of investment in organizing records so they can be easily located.

He said there was a disconnect “between rhetoric and delivery” when it came to Ottawa’s stated commitment to open government.

“As with many things with this government … there is a gap between the lofty language and the execution or delivery,” he said. “What you will find is it is very spotty.”

Ottawa’s National Action Plan on Open Government commits it to being more transparent and accountable.

The Access to Information Act also places a legal requirement on the government to keep organized records and to publish guides each year to help people find them.

The act requires it to publish a detailed description of the types of records held by government departments.

“Open Government is about making government more accessible to everyone. This means giving greater access to government data and information to the Canadian public and the businesses community,” the government’s website on open government says.

Mr. Wernick, who was the federal government’s top bureaucrat – the Clerk of the Privy Council – from 2016 to 2019, said there was overall a lack of dedication to recordkeeping in Ottawa and a great “mess of things.”

Records were scattered around different government departments on floppy discs, diskettes, paper record files and in boxes, as well as on servers and in the Cloud.

He told The Globe that some federal departments and institutions organized their records well and had put tools in place to make them easy to find, but others were chaotic.

“Like many things, you’ll find pockets of excellence and some really cool things that are happening, and then there are other areas which are … rusted and shambolic. There’s a lack of consistency of effort around,” he said.

He said the amount of information being generated by the government – including e-mails – was more than its “absorption capacity” to get it digitized and scanned.

The government’s archive, he said, has “an enormous warehouse, like something out of Indiana Jones movies” full of boxes of records waiting to be organized, but there are neither the people nor the money to do it.

He said there should be more investment in developing search tools so that government records can be easily located, including if someone requests them under freedom-of-information laws. Organizing records would also help the federal policy of proactive disclosure, he said.

“What is really important is the navigation and recordkeeping. It’s just so uneven,” he said.

Mr. Wernick said with some records dating back centuries, as well as stacks of paper and a plethora of e-mails, deciding what to keep for posterity was a skill.

Retrieval and information management should be an integral part of an open-government agenda, including how to tag, classify and sort records, he said, but it was far down the government’s priority list.

He said “investing in basic conservation” and protecting records from flood and fire was also crucial, to stop them from being degraded.

Mr. Wernick told a Commons committee last month that the offices of the prime minister and federal ministers should no longer be exempt from access-to-information law, and there should be a greater onus in Ottawa on pro-actively disclosing as much information to the public as possible.

Monica Granados, press secretary to Treasury Board president Mona Fortier, said the government has “enshrined pro-active publication in law, strengthening openness and transparency across government.”

“The open-government portal now holds 34,000 data/information records, 2 million pro-active disclosures from more than 160 institutions, as well as summaries of completed access-to-information requests,” she said.

Source: Improving record keeping crucial to open government, says former head of federal public service

Filed under Government Tagged with , , ,

Rubin: Exposing Library and Archives Canada’s dismal transparency record

2022/11/01 Leave a comment

Another illustration of how broken ATIP is:

When I first came to Ottawa in the mid-1960s, I started going to the National Archives to access government records. I met Archives personnel who were trying to get the federal government to adopt better electronic record management to meet the growing demands for information.

But their efforts were largely ignored as more and more government record management came under the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) authority. There, record retrievals became more difficult and descended into a confusing and conflicted state of instability.

This was at a time when government department libraries were disappearing. My ability to freely wander the shelves and stacks and to get reference help ended when the access-to-information regime took over in the mid-1980s. Agency record collections became secret and inaccessible to the public.

By then, the Treasury Board Secretariat had firmly taken control of overall information management policy, with National Archives playing second fiddle. TBS sought to “standardize” and sanitize federal information holdings at a cost of many millions of dollars.

With the 2004 merger of the National Archives and the National Library, the new Library and Archives Canada (LAC) took on the attributes of a regular government agency under the Treasury Board’s tight control, driven by the latest software and ever-increasing secrecy practices.

Just another obedient agency

When Daniel Caron—neither a professional librarian, nor archivist—was put in charge at the LAC in 2009, he accelerated this deference to government powers, acting more like a TBS lieutenant.

He pressed for greater “modernization,” clumsily and at great expense transmitting LAC holdings into electronic file holdings. Caron didn’t fight the cuts imposed on LAC’s professional archivists and librarians, and seemed to relish reining in any staff’s independent actions to help the public. Nor did he fight the Public Works demand that LAC’s auditorium and meeting facilities be reserved only for federally sanctioned events and not for public use (Justice Paul Rouleau’s inquiry on the use of the Emergencies Act is currently taking place in the Library and Archives Canada building on Wellington Street).

Caron’s end came in 2013 after I obtained access to records that showed he was, at taxpayer expense, taking Spanish lessons. When he refused to end the language training, the heritage minister at the time fired him.

Eventually, LAC got a professional head and some of their former information reference service capacities were restored. But it was much too late for LAC to gain an influential central role under the Access to Information Act.

One example of how LAC had become just another obedient agency is how it took little interest in even housing or publicly listing and preserving past completed access-to-information requests.

That task, ignored for 20 years, was eventually done though the so-called open government portal, though the actual records received under access requests were never posted, just the titles of thousands of requests. The result is that much of the unofficial—at times very valuable and of historic record—of what the government did was destroyed without Canada’s retainer agency or historic records, LAC, giving one iota.

Not so well known was that for many years archive authorities had secret deals. One such arrangement that I have written about previously was that ministers’ “personal” and “political” past records deposited at LAC were allowed to remain secret for multiple years—even permanently—as demanded by ex-ministers and prime ministers.

LAC continues to make available public funds, office space, and staff to past prime ministers who assemble their so-called “personal” and “political” records. Such “private donations” get charitable income tax receipts. It’s not clear whether LAC has ever pushed back on prime ministers on ministerial claims made, Trump-style, about those records really being their personal property, a highly questionable practice in the first place.

Another long-standing deal is with the House Speaker, allowing in-camera parliamentary committee records to be hidden and housed at LAC for long periods of time.

A more recent 2018 secrecy arrangement with the Supreme Court of Canada favours many of the judges’ deliberation records remaining secret for a minimum of 50 years or more.

If that were not contentious enough, LAC has also turned its back on acquiring and preserving residential school records. Instead—and likely a better arrangement—many of those government records were sent to the University of Manitoba’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in 2015. LAC, however, still has many residential school records in its possession and has been slow to get those and other federal records processed and out, especially those records held tightly by the federal Indigenous departments.

Which brings us to the 2018 Dagg case where LAC issued consultant Michael Dagg an 80-year wait-time, given the estimated 780,000 records dealing with the RCMP’s Project Anecdote, a 10-year investigation on secret commissions, money laundering and corruption, including in real estate, an investigation which ran out of steam and from which no charges were ever laid.

Dagg complained about the excessive delay to Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard, who then requested LAC take a mere 65 years to respond. The delay issue went to the Federal Court for appeal. Sadly, it was discontinued upon Dagg’s death this past September.

Faster info declassification a good first step to change

LAC, as Dagg, I, and others well-discovered, has become a typical unresponsive and obstinate bureaucratic agency quite willing to severely censor our tax-paid records under legislated secrecy claims.

Maynard’s scathing investigation report on LAC, released on April 26, 2022, readily confirms LAC’s unacceptable long wait-times to access requests, amounting to LAC regularly not meeting its legal obligation under access legislation.

The minister responsible for reporting on LAC activities, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, responded to Maynard’s report recommendations by refusing to take responsibility to correct LAC’s poor access-to-information services. He declined to put forward a strategic plan to quickly correct LAC’s laggard and disgraceful access-to-information record.

Maynard’s report scolded LAC and the Government of Canada (read the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Privy Council Office, and the Prime Minister’s Office) for not taking the lead to quickly declassify records it holds and receives from government agencies. Maynard recommended that the federal government establish a strong declassification directive as a crucial element to the functioning of access legislation.

However, LAC no longer seems up to the task of promptly declassifying those records it has in its possession. That’s even if agencies send any those records at all.

It would be helpful if the information commissioner could get tough on LAC for failing to declassify their records for public use on a timely basis, and if she, along with a rejuvenated LAC’s help, could penalize those government agencies that don’t bother to keep written records, that alter them, or that refuse to hand over records to LAC.

Another serious problem is that LAC quietly follows TBS’s 40-year practice of massive record destruction. Hundreds of thousands of draft records annually don’t make it at all to LAC as TBS orders agencies to regularly destroy draft transitory operational records.

One thing that LAC still does a relatively good job doing is collecting outside legally required deposited information from those publishing and that includes letting the public know about those published records.

Once seen as an arm’s-length agency keeping check on the PMO and the Treasury Board Secretariat’s all-powerful grip on federal records has simply wilted and been cast aside by the same cabal.

LAC has fallen in line with the centralized secrecy commands that rule Ottawa, and has even outdone many other government agencies in their dislike to giving Canadians access to their records on a timely and fuller basis.

Can LAC become more than a secrecy shill for the government? At the very least it would help if LAC, who holds the vast majority of government historical records, gets going in declassifying more records for release. That would be a start.

LAC badly needs to change course and become an independent record manager force with integrity, a pro-disclosure champion for the fulsome and quick release of federal information.

Respect and trust would follow.

Ken Rubin is a long-time observer of transparency and secrecy trends in Ottawa. He is reachable via kenrubin.ca

Source: Exposing Library and Archives Canada’s dismal transparency record

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Clark: How your right to know is getting stymied by the Denial Machine

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the broke ATIP system and how this impacts service to the public, particularly with respect to immigration (IRCC does a good job in publishing most of its operational data on the government-wide open data site):

Thirty-nine years ago, after a wave of post-Watergate epiphanies about government secrecy, the Canadian government passed the first federal Access to Information Act. Ever since then it is has been building a denial machine.

It would be easy to pin the blame on secretive politicians trying to obstruct the public’s ability to know what is going on inside government, because they have done that. Prime ministers including Justin Trudeau and his predecessor, Stephen Harper, have broken promises to open government.

But it’s not just that. There is bureaucratic aversion to openness, and a default assumption that making the public’s business public would be tricky. Complicated. Impractical.

And there is another problem: The government’s failure to provide information about simple things is gumming up the system.

Take a look at the recent The Globe and Mail story in which Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard is quoted telling a House of Commons committee that every department in government is failing to keep up with Access to Information requests. Should there be reforms? Ms. Maynard told the committee, in a phrase that should leave us all gobsmacked, that “respecting the law as it currently exists would represent an important first step.”

The government’s Access to Information system, which cost $90-milion in 2021, is garnering 10,000 complaints a year, the story noted. And it included a statistic that offers a clue to one big chunk of the problem: Access to Information requests to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada have increased so much they now outnumber requests to all other departments.

Why? Because IRCC is so bad at providing basic routine info that people are resorting to freedom-of-information requests.

The Access to Information law is supposed to allow people to pay a small fee to request federal government records or, at least, records that aren’t covered by the extensive legal exceptions.

The system for implementing the Act – the $90-million machine – is based on finding the requested documents, but heavily focused on applying exceptions and blacking stuff out. Ask for a copy of a government contract and often the prices of items will be redacted, even though the Federal Court of Canada has ruled such information should be released. One huge problem is delays, sometimes of years. With information, access delayed is often access denied.

That’s why the volume of requests to the Immigration department is instructive. Many come from people asking for info on their applications, said Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland. He publishes an immigration-policy newsletter, Lexbase, which is based heavily on access-to-information releases.

IRCC has for decades been unable or unwilling to provide updates to applicants, so Members of Parliament are often deluged with requests for help. Increasingly, their offices file access requests.

If you’re a regular internet shopper, you might recognize those requests as the immigration version of a common customer-service question: “Where’s my stuff?” Companies such as Amazon have online tracking systems that give customers simple answers: whether the order has been received, or shipped, and so on. If they didn’t, they’d be deluged with inquiries. But IRCC doesn’t do that.

Now the government’s failure to provide basic information is gumming up the system that is supposed to allow Canadians to pierce the veil of secrecy.

More broadly, Ottawa’s failure to make openness routine – even though doing so is easy in the digital age – makes getting access to out-of-the-ordinary information slower, and harder.

Requesters sometimes ask for copies of agreements for “grants and contributions” that set out government funding for organizations and groups. These should be automatically published on a website. So should all contracts except in rare exceptions. And so on.

But politicians don’t much care for that sort of transparency. Why let more people see things that might raise embarrassing questions? When the system is clogged up, as it is now, they don’t have to care. There’s no real penalty for failing to respect the Access to Information law.

If the government spent twice the money on a functioning Access to Information system, it would be well worth it. Instead, over decades, Ottawa has built – by design and by accident – a system that is effectively a machine to deny and delay.

Source: How your right to know is getting stymied by the Denial Machine

Filed under Government, Immigration Tagged with ,

← Older posts