Budget cuts may be hurting access to data
OTTAWA — The federal budget axe may be chopping away at citizens’ right to information about government, a parliamentary watchdog warns.
Suzanne Legault, information commissioner of Canada, says her office has seen a sharp rise in complaints about departments that take too long to answer requests under the Access to Information Act.
The increase in such complaints over the last six months is likely linked to budget cuts that will remove 19,200 public servants from the federal workforce by 2015, Legault says in a new report.
“If this trend continues, it could seriously stretch our investigative team,” says the document.
“We suspect . . . that budget cuts may be a factor, since a jump in administrative complaints suggests that institutions are struggling to meet their basic obligations under the Act.”
Legault’s office is itself caught in the same budget squeeze, with funding reduced by five per cent as the number of complaints coming through the door rises, to 1,596 in 2012-2013, up by eight per cent from the previous year.
Legault will tell MPs at a House of Commons committee later this month that she needs more staff to deal with the burgeoning workload.
“Any meaningful solution could only come in the form of an infusion of resources so we could increase our staff complement,” she says in a report tabled in Parliament.
The latest round of cuts, begun in 2011but accelerating in the 2012 budget, seem to have reversed a modest improvement in the timeliness of responses under the access-to-information system.
“We’re now back to an all-time low in timeliness,” Legault said in an interview, citing statistics released in December by Tony Clement, president of the Treasury Board, which is responsible for the access-to-information system.
The percentage of requests answered within the basic 30-day time frame specified by the Act hit 55 per cent in 2011-2012, the lowest ever and down almost five points from when the Tories first formed government in early 2006. A decade ago, 66 per cent were answered within 30 days.
Departments also violated legislated deadlines for responses in one of every seven requests in 2011-2012.
“This is disquieting,” said Legault. “There is a number of institutions where it’s clearly having to do with the level of resourcing.”
But a spokesperson for Clement says the government’s costcutting has deliberately spared the access-to-information system. Access to information “has not been part of that,” Andrea Mandel-Campbell said in an interview.
She also noted there has been a 50 per cent increase in the number of requests arriving annually since 2006, currently more than 43,000 a year, many of them more complex than in the past.
Given the extra workload, the government has done well in maintaining a “pretty steady state” for timeliness, she said.