In ‘The Dark Country’, an article in the January/February Walrus, Gil Sochat describes the frustration of journalists whose work is blocked by systemic delays in Canada’s Access to Information process. In the article, Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Journalist’s Association -- a group that recently co-authored a study ranking this country’s Access to Information laws behind that of India, Mexico, and Pakistan -- blasts our current government:

“[Prime Minister Stephen Harper has] gone beyond merely gagging cabinet ministers and professional civil servants, stalling access to information requests and blackballing reporters who ask tough questions. He has built a pervasive government apparatus whose sole purpose is to strangle the flow of public information.” 

The article details the current problems with the Access to Information process, such as an ‘Amber Light’ flag, where half of incoming Access to Information requests are labeled as 'sensitive', requiring delays of four to nine months. Further, if the government refuses to release a document, the arbitration process for appealing the decision can take up to two years. This systemic reluctance to release information has a very real impact on our democracy.

These days, journalists rarely have the luxury of chasing a story that takes a year or more to write. Increasingly, journalists are giving up on filing requests; stories that break in other countries via Access to Information requests, such as the UK’s recent parliamentarian expense scandal**, now must be discovered in Canada by other means, if they are to reach the light of day at all.

Sochat asks: “Is it possible for our political culture to shift away from its traditional emphasis on discretion and toward transparency?” But, after posing the question, Sochat stops short of suggesting any solutions. A look at how other countries are handling the problem may provide some answers.

In the UK, the non-profit MySociety has built a website, WhatDoTheyKnow.com as a citizen gateway for filing Freedom of Information requests (that country’s equivalent to Access to Information requests). The site helps citizens target what department to send their request to, and provides an online form for filing the request. The site then sends the request on their behalf. Departmental answers are sent back to WhatDoTheyKnow.com, which posts them for all to see. The site also tracks how long requests have been outstanding, highlighting those that have remained unanswered. In October, MySociety estimated that over 10% percent of all UK FOI requests in the 2nd quarter of 2009 were made through the site.

Does a website making it easier to file FOI requests mean that more requests get filed? It stands to reason that it would. But according to BBC Journalist Martin Rosenbaum, while the number of UK requests has increased since WhatDoTheyKnow began operating, the increase has been primarily in requests to departments that are not particularly popular on WhatDoTheyKnow, so the site is not directly to blame. In fact, by providing searchable results of past inquiries, WhatDoTheyKnow may well decrease the total number of FOI requests, as citizens don’t have to ask the same question twice.

FOI administrators in the city of Dallas, Texas recently discovered a similar principle: that publishing more information can lead to less requests. They found that once they implemented a virtual reading room of their city archives, the number of FOI requests dropped by 83%, as ‘problem’ citizens – those that had filed the most requests -- were reassured their government had nothing to hide.

Interestingly, Canada’s Access to Information law may have already paved the way for providing this type of virtual reading room. A little-known stipulation of the Access to Information Act compels federal departments to maintain offline reading rooms – such as the one described here (search on Reading Room) – which include archives of the answers to filled ATIP requests, going back two to three years. These dusty, neglected archives are maintained by the Information Commissioners for each department, and any citizen or journalist can make an appointment to browse their contents in person. It takes only a baby-step of imagination to go from an offline reading room to an online one, with all the benefits that would bring. The amount this would save in freeing up the office space used for maintaining the archives alone seems like it should be enough to justify the cost of the online archiving system.

I've heard rumors that explorations regarding virtual reading rooms may be underway at the Office of the Information Commissioner as we speak. In the meantime, journalists can do more to not just publicize the issue and its impact on our democracy in articles like ‘The Dark Country’, but to also characterize the problem using concrete statistics. Tellingly, none of the journalists I’ve interviewed for VisibleGovernment’s stab last year at cloning WhatDoTheyKnow for Canada -- which, as discussed here, is made more complicated by our government’s insistence on communicating via paper -- were able to tell me the average delay for an Access to Information request in Canada, or provide general statistics on the process. They just knew that their own requests were taking a long time. The journalists I spoke to, with only one exception, were using a paper-based process to file and track requests, meaning old, unanswered requests went in a drawer, and were usually forgotten.

It's an old management standard that what’s not measured doesn’t get fixed. The Information Commissioner, whose job it is to address systemic issues with the Access to Information process, could help matters by starting to publish the Access to Information response time statistics collected under section 70 c-1 of the act in a central location where they can be easily browsed and compared. (While the office currently publishes compliance report cards, these reports seem to be only done for selected departments, and are not a comprehensive review.) Statistics published for each department would highlight where the issues are, and provide a baseline for improvement.

The answers are out there, we need only the political will to implement them.

** For an entertaining first-hand account from Ben Leapmen, the UK journalist who filed the FOI requests for parliamentarian expenses that ended several MP’s political careers, including the speaker of the house, see this video, starting at about minute 21. My favourite quote, from an MP who was criticised for using public funds to build a house for his pet ducks: “The ducks never liked it anyway.”