Many of Canada's municipal police forces are withholding information that sheds light on how their officers use Tasers, while other government agencies and institutions, including the CBC, are slow to respond to access-to-information requests, according to an audit conducted for the Canadian Newspaper Association.

The annual audit released Friday was prepared by an investigative team for the CNA to test the length of time, cost and completeness of requests for federal, provincial and municipal agencies to disclose information that should be publicly available on request under access-to-information laws.

As part of the audit, a team from the University of King’s College in Halifax sent freedom-of-information requests last year to police forces in all 10 provinces and the Yukon. The researchers requested the forms that officers must complete each time they draw Tasers.

More than 20 people in Canada have died after being stunned with a Taser. Taser International insists the devices cannot be blamed for the deaths. However, medical officials have cited the guns as contributing factors in some cases.

The forms contain details of how the Taser was used, such as the name of the officer, the number of times the person was zapped and the circumstances that led to the confrontation. Researchers asked for "all reports prepared by police officers in 2007 and 2008 after their use of Tasers or any similar electronic devices."

Some police forces co-operated willingly after removing sensitive information, while other forces demanded unusually large fees, said David Gollob, the CNA's senior vice-president of policy and communication.

For instance, the Winnipeg police force requested $4,600, while other police forces, such as the one in Hamilton, Ont., simply said no, he said.

"The public has a right to know that you can walk out of your house and not expect to be Tasered by somebody because you’re walking erratically, or perhaps you had too much to drink, or some other situation that may have provoked that response," Gollob told CBC News on Friday.

The audit said the Hamilton police force responded to the requests by saying Ontario law forbade the release of Taser use reports. It noted other Ontario police forces provided the reports for a fee.

The RCMP recently released similar information on Tasers after yielding to public pressure.

Sask., Man. get top marks: Quebec, N.B., far behind

The audit also found a wide inconsistency among responses from municipalities, provinces and the Yukon, as well as from federal departments and Crown corporations.

"Whether it be details of expenditures by municipalities, or federal policies on talking to the media, what you get and how fast you get it depends on where you are making the request," said Fred Vallance-Jones, a journalism professor at the University of King’s College who ran the audit in collaboration with the CNA.

"Information freely available from some government agencies was denied by others. And when it wasn’t denied, prohibitive fee estimates often took it out of the reach of all but the wealthiest requesters."

Institutions in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Yukon did best, with more than 80 per cent of requests answered within the deadline, according to the report.

New Brunswick, where municipalities are not included in access legislation, had the worst performance at 42 per cent.

Quebec was second worst, with just slightly under half of the requests getting a response within 30 days, despite the province's law actually requiring institutions to respond within 20 days.

Federal institutions were on time 61 per cent of the time, the report said.

Low grade for CBC

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was the least transparent of the federal agencies tested, according to the audit report.

The CBC asked for a six-month extension to release a list of its top employees, their classifications and their salary ranges, while most federal agencies in the audit handed over the same information within a month, the audit report said.

"Six months to respond is a bit unreasonable," Gollob said.

The CBC acknowledged but didn’t answer a request for its policy on employees speaking to the media, according to the CNA report.

CBC spokesman Jeff Keay said a backlog of requests had developed since the CBC came under the federal Access to Information law in September 2007.

Since then, the CBC has moved to speed things up by adding staff to its office handling the requests and reduced the backlog to about 120 outstanding applications, he said.

He also noted that about 500 of the more than 700 access-to-information requests filed with the CBC were requested by one individual.

"We were guilty of underestimating the volume," Keay told CBCNews.ca on Friday.

"Since we realized we had a backlog, we've been working to eliminate that backlog as quickly as we can, making a good faith effort to do that in co-operation with the information commissioner."

The CNA's Gollob acknowledged the CBC has been "inundated" with requests, but said all institutions covered by the country's freedom-of-information laws have a legal duty to be more transparent.

"I think it's fair to anticipate that there would be a tremendous amount of interest in having basic questions answered," he said. "Unfortunately, from the findings of this test, the CBC is not up to the mark yet."

Requests filed simultaneously

The audit team sent 219 requests for electronic database records to 11 federal departments and Crown corporations, 22 municipalities and the police forces serving those municipalities, and to departments and ministries in all provinces and the Yukon.

One request was removed from the audit after the agency — Edmonton Police — claimed it did not receive a cheque for the application fee, leaving 218 counted in the results.

Five written requests were devised for each level being tested.

They ranged from a list of a municipality’s passenger vehicle fleet and a copy of the municipality’s policy on idling vehicles, the number and costs of out-of-town trips taken by a mayor, and a list including the hospitality events put on by the deputy minister’s office, or by the minister’s office in 2007 and 2008 to the date of the request.

The requests were filed simultaneously so all agencies were tested at the same time using the same wording, according to the audit report.

The study kept track of seven parameters relating to each request. These were:

• The date the request was received.
• The date the agency issued a decision.
• The type of decision (full release, partial denial, full denial, no records exist, time extension if beyond the end of the audit period and not replaced by a decision, or fee estimate).
• The number of days the institution took to go from receiving the request to issuing a decision.
• The amount of any fee estimate.
• The number of days for any time extension.
• Any exemptions to release that were claimed by the institution.

The agencies receiving the requests were not told the requests were part of an audit, the report said. In order to guard against the possibility that requests from media would be treated differently from routine requests, a student was hired to prepare and submit the requests, which were mailed from a private address in the student’s name.

Communications with agencies were via an email account set up in the student’s name.