Hold the applause: Some federal government departments are posting access-to-information requests online



A number of departments are making it easier for Canadians to obtain documents through the federal Access to Information law. They are putting their access-to-information requests online. However, internal documents CBC News obtained through the access law demonstrate that the government was prepared to make the same move 10 years ago but pulled the plug at the last minute.

Several departments, including Health Canada and Agriculture and Afri-food Canada, quietly began posting online requests for records in this past summer. Users can visit the websites, read through requests for specific records such as briefing notes and email correspondence, and then request the material.

Federal Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault, whose office also began releasing these requests on its website, says although the government is moving in the right direction, Canada is falling behind in its efforts to make government records more accessible. Legault cited countries such as Mexico, Australia and the United States, and provinces like Quebec, which post requests online and make it easy for citizens to search. Click on these links to listen to my World at Six piece or hear my full interview with Legault.

Legault says the ideal would have been for the government to create a web portal that would allow Canadians to search requests from all departments covered by the Access to Information Act. Though having departments proactively disclose their requests online, Legault says it's not as effective as a single place online where Canadians could visit.

"I think in access to information in the last few years, we have been losing ground," she said. "So we have to continue the pressure."

Proactive disclosure

Health Canada, Agriculture-Agri-food Canada and the Treasury Board Secretariat are among a handful of departments posting their completed access-to-information requests online. But that's only a fraction of the more than 250 federal departments, Crown corporations and other institutions covered by the act.

The information commissioner was pushing for a one-stop web portal where citizens could plug in key words to search requests for all departments. For the government to follow suit, Treasury Board would have to collect the requests from all departments, and post the information to a searchable website.

Though it is no longer considering this as an option, documents CBC News obtained through access to information demonstrate that Treasury Board was ready to do this several years ago. "In June 2001, the system had the technical capability to allow public access... However, the existence of a number of procedural and policy issues led (the Treasury Board Secretariat) to postpone the implementation of this feature."

(David McKie, Sept. 25, 2008) Scanned Release Package-final

The Treasury Board even attached a price tag to the initiative: between $260,000 and $500,000 a year.

The following year, the department received a report called "Access to Information: Making it work for Canadians." That task force, which was comprised of senior civil servants from a number of government departments, including Treasury Board and the Department of Justice, the Department of Finance and the National Archives, recommended that "government institutions be encouraged to post summaries of the information they have released which may be of interest to others, in addition (to) depositing a hard copy of the documents in their reading rooms."

(David McKie, December 1, 2010) Report of the Access to Informatio

Dean Beeby was a member of a committee that advised that task force. Beeby, deputy editor of The Canadian Press, says the members felt it was important to make records more accessible to the public, though he was surprised to learn that just the year before the Treasury Board received the task force report, it actually had the technology to make all the information public.

This is why he can't understand why now it's up to individual departments to decide on their own whether to post information online.

"Why we're starting from scratch to build a system that was in place ten years ago? It's just more delay, delay, delay," Beeby said.

Two years after Treasury Board received the task force's recommendations, it surveyed access-to-information officials on their use of an internal database called CAIRS, which was designed to track requests across the government departments. Even though CAIRS -- an acronym for Coordination Access to Information Requests System -- was designed to for internal use, the topic of making it available to the public was broached once again. One respondent to the survey urged access "be given to the public through the Internet."

For her part, Information Commissioner Legault says the fact that the government was ready to do it 10 years ago demonstrates that a public, centralized system is possible.

"There's nothing in the technology that prevents the government from having a centralized system for all access to information requests," she said.

CAIRS

Before the Harper government killed it in 2008, CAIRS allowed the Treasury Board to collect requests from departments each month. Among other things, the idea was to allow users to see if other departments were handling duplicate requests. Critics said the system the government could also use CAIRS to thwart access by keeping tabs on troublesome requests on the same topic that were being sent to many departments. Supporters of CAIRS said it made sense to have a centralized system for bureaucrats to use.

Although CAIRS was never meant to be public ( disclosure: I made CAIRS available to the public through a special website that can still be used here), there was a recognition back in 2001 that the technology could be used to open up government and make it more accessible to the public.

At the time it was felt that CAIRS was hobbled by too many problems: bureaucrats weren't submitting information in time; and it was difficult to use. But in that same internal document that revealed Treasaury Board's discussion about making it public, the department assumed much of the blame for the problems with its internal use because it failed to monitor the CAIRS database and educate bureaucrats about ways to use it more effectively.

Then when the Conservatives introduced the Federal Accountability Act, several more federal institutions, such as the CBC and Canada Post, were added, but they weren't covered by CAIRS. So instead of improving the system, the Harper government killed it.

In the internal briefing notes prepared for MPs and the then-Treasury Board President, Vic Toews, there was never any mention that the government discussed making access to information requests public as far back as 2001. Instead, the briefing notes and talking points played up the deficiencies of CAIRS and contained accusations that the Liberals used the system to keep a tight control over requests that could led to embarrassing news stories.

A May 6, 2008, briefing note to Toews cited the expense of maintaining the system -- about $50,000 a year in maintenance costs -- and claimed the money would be "better spent on improved statistical reporting."

Now, some ten years after toying with the idea of making access to information requests publicly available, some departments are posting their own requests online, and more of them may do so. How many, and how soon? It's difficult to say. The Treasury Board refused to provide a spokesperson to be interviewed. Instead, a spokesperson sent a vaguely worded email: " The (access-to-information) community is collaborating with (Treasury Board Secretariat) to develop and share best practices for the departments who choose to post summaries of their completed access to information requests."

CP's Dean Beeby says the fact that a few departments are proactively disclosing access-to-information requests deserves some praise.

"You want to encourage good behavior. So let's toot the horn of the very small number of departments that are doing this," he said. "But really we need direction from the centre and we need a political endorsement by the ministers and by the Treasury Board and by the prime minister to get this thing moving."