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ATI workshop 13 Oct.

2011Jeff Sallot

Carleton University School of Journalism and Communication

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Secrecy is for losers. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Secrecy is for losers Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I love this quote. It gets right to the point. You probably best rememberMoynihan as the US senator from New York who was succeeded by HilaryClinton. But he also held a number of government posts under bothRepublican and Democratic administrations going back to JFK, includingambassador to the UN.But I think his best legacy may be the work he did as the chair of acongressional commission on the uses and abuses of governmental secrecy.

In Canada, our equivalent would be the late Jed Baldwin, who was a Tory MPfrom Peace River and really is the godfather of our own access to information

law.

The whole open government movements and the access to information phaseof it really came out of the Watergate scandals in the United States and thesecurity service scandals within the RCMP in the 1970s.Journalists of course played a major role in exposing both Watergate and theRCMP scandals.So here in Canada journalists and their news organizations were lobbyists foran access to information act.

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Who uses ATI?

Unfortunately, what we see now is that fewer journalists are actually using theact and there are reasons for that. But also of concern is the fact that large

news organizations are not as active as they could be in promoting reforms ofour act.

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Canada is falling behind

Our own Access act took effect on Canada Day July 1, 1983 and broadlyspeaking it provides a right of access to information contained in records

under the control of government institutions.Believe it or not, Canada was considered one of the world pioneers in theopen government area back in 1983.We've fallen behind, sadly. And in fact I was recently at an internationalconference in Mexico City on open government. It was embarrassing to realizethat Mexico of all countries has a better legal framework for access toinformation then does Canada. The right of access is enshrined now in theMexican Constitution.Suzanne Legault, our own access commissioner, and she also spoke at thisconference. She said that in comparison to newer access regimes in many

countries, like Mexico and Chile, our access act is like a venerable older ladywho needs a hip replacement. But what the Canadian government is offeringin terms of reform is more like a botox treatment. Putting a prettier face onmay not be all bad, but a hip replacement would be better.Our own access act is not constitutionally entrenched. Its only a statute ofParliament and can be amended for better or worse with relative ease whenthere is a majority government.

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Principles Records should be open by right

Exceptions must really be exceptional

Censorship is reviewable by an independent party

Our own access act is not constitutionally entrenched. Its only a statute ofParliament and can be amended for better or worse with relative ease when

there is a majority government.What I want to do this morning in this 1st session is to run through themechanics of the act, outline who is covered by the act, and begin to look atstrategies for using the act.We'll get into strategies in greater detail in our 2nd session later this morning.The Canadian act reflects 3 principles. One, that government informationshould be available to the public. I would go even further than this and I wouldargue that the information belongs to the public in the first place and we oughtto be thinking of this as public access to publicly owned information.The 2nd broad principle in our act is that there may be a need for exceptions

to the right of access but that they should be very limited and very specific. Inother words access should be the default position and exceptions reallyshould be exceptional.

And the 3rd principal is that of review. That in fact when an exception toaccess is invoked there should be a review by a person or a body that isindependent of government. And this is the main function of the access toinformation Commissioner and her office.

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The court says:The overarching purpose of access to information

legislation is to facilitate democracy

So we don't have a specific constitutional or charter right to access. But theSupreme Court has said in some very strong language that access is a very

important part of our democratic structure.

Fourteen years ago there was a case decided unanimously by the SupremeCourt which stated the principle this way. And this is a decision written byJustice Laforest. The overarching purpose of access to information legislationis to facilitate democracy by helping to ensure that citizens have theinformation required to participate meaningfully in the democratic process andthat politicians and bureaucrats remain accountable to the citizenry.

Majority governments, in my experience, find it all too easy to say that they are

accountable at the ballot box and just leave it at that.

But the Supreme Court has said that it's more than just accountability throughelections and the parliamentary process.They are in effect saying ordinary citizens have this right all the time.

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Who can file? Citizens

Legal residents

Canadian businesses

Who actually has the right to use the access to information act? Any Canadiancitizen whether you are living here or living abroad. So your Washington

correspondent can make a request under the Canadian act. If you are aCanadian citizen you can file under the act.

And anyone who is a permanent resident of Canada. This would includepeople here under the immigration act and refugee protection act.Corporate bodies with a Canadian presence can also file requests. Andbelieve me they do.

Once you get into this youll also discover there is a cottage industry here inOttawa of law firms and lobbyists filing for corporate clients. The requester ofinformation is a lawyer or maybe the paralegal but the ultimate customer is a

Corporation, maybe even a foreign corporation..

So corporate interests are frequent users. This is particularly true with largedefense contracts at stake.

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Routine information

The act has a provision that is of particular interest for journalists. It says that aformal request should not be a reason to withhold the release of information

that normally would be made public. In other words you should be able to callup government officials and get them to provide you with routine informationrather than making you go through a formal request. And well talk about thissome more when we discuss search strategies.

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The clock ticks for 30 days

The act says that the government institution must respond to a request within30 days. That's 30 calendar days beginning from the day after a request is

received.

So in theory if you ask for information today about some government activityyou should have the information no later than a month from today.We know that in practice this is rarely the case and we will talk about delayslater.Nevertheless, the act says the government has 30 days to respond. Aresponse can be very minimal. It can be as minimal as acknowledging the factthat they received your request. And that's usually part of a letter saying thatthey are seeking an extension for any number of reasons.

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Im from the government and Im here to help you.

From time to time youll run across someone at a departmental access unitwholl call up and ask you whether you can amend your request to make it

more focused. That official may be trying to be helpful. But be wary. Anamended request can be treated as a new request, starting the 30-day clockagain at day one. Clarify whether this will be the case. And if it is, let youroriginal request stand and then file a separate new request along the lines ofthe helpful suggestions from the bureaucrat.

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Crowns

The access act originally did not cover Crown corporations and parliamentaryagencies like the access commissioners office itself. But in 2007 the minority

Harper government amended the act to bring Crown corporations under theact and agencies like the access commissioner's office.Since then by the way the information Commissioner's office has becomesomething of a showcase for best practices in government.

The 2007 amendment provided that the CBC did not have to discloseinformation of her journalistic nature or relating to operations.

The idea was to make sure CBC journalists did not have to identify confidentialsources or prematurely make public the stories its reporters were working on.

This provision is now before the courts with the strange and ironic twist thatthe Commissioner is trying to get the CBC to disclose information, at least toher, so that she can make a determination of whether the CBC is properlyinvoking the journalistic exception.As you may know, CBC has been flooded with requests from other mediaorganizations. It seems everyone wants to know what Peter Mansbridge ispaid.

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Paperwork

Now I'm going to run you through the basic mechanics of filing a request. Likeall things bureaucratic there is of course a form you can fill out.

The form even has a Treasury Board number 35057. Its got little boxes totick and lines to sign and it looks a lot simpler than it is.But I'm going to suggest that you do not use the form. Most requests made by

journalists really are more complex than the small bit of space on the TreasuryBoard form describing the details of what you're looking for.

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Fees

Cheaper than a pumpkin latte

The tricky part is the $5 access request filing fee. If you're filing by fax or by e-mailyou will have to provide a credit card number and authorization to charge $5 to thatcard.

The $5 filing fee is discretionary. In other words a government department or agencycan waive the fee. But in fact very few do. If you do file by snail mail and use ahardcopy check it must be made out to the Receiver General of Canada.

The $5 fee is a bit of an irritant. But it's not onerous and it hasn't been raised from the$5 level since the act was enacted in 1983.

What you might want to consider is to bundle two or more access requests to thesame department in the same letter. But make clear that you want each requesttreated separately. And you pay $5 for each and every request in the letter. That $5also entitles you to five hours of search time by a knowledgeable employee of the

department to search for the records you are requesting and to prepare them forrelease. The department can charge you for additional hours at the rate of $10 anhour. If money is an issue make sure your original request specifies that you are to benotified if there are going to be any additional fees. You can also ask about thecredentials and knowledge of the department the searcher actually has. They cantdelay a request because of the need for additional search time if it is some summerintern or a temp who is doing the search.

While we are talking about fees you might want to word your request to say you areseeking access to the documents and not copies of the documents in the firstinstance. That way you wont get slapped with heavy photocopy charges forthousands of pages of documents you dont really want or need. You are entitledunder the law to come to the department and inspect the material that is being

released and you can then specify what pages you want copies of.

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Your privacy right

If you are making requests regularly to the same department you might wantto create a template letter with boilerplate wording..

You also might want to consider whether you want to divulge the fact you arefrom a news organization.

The law says that the identity of the person making the request is covered bythe privacy act. That means that the access coordinator and his or her officialsare not supposed to be telling anyone else in the department or the ministersoffice who's asking for the information. Depending on how much faith youhave in the integrity of the access coordinator in any one department youmight find this uncomfortable.

There are all sorts of legitimate ways to mask your identity. If your byline is notwell-known for example you might apply for information using your homeaddress and home phone number or personal cell phone number. Or youmight have an admin assistant file for you and use an address other than youroffice address.

On the other hand I think there are advantages to journalists revealing thatthey are behind a request.

And I'll get back to this later this morning

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Take an all-government approach

So that's a very quick overview of basic mechanics of filing a simple request. Most ofyour requests, however, are not going to be simple. But are there any questionsabout the getting started part before we move on to search strategies?

Next were going to discuss some strategies for making a successful request.If you are on a beat you'll soon get to know a bit about the government departmentsinvolved.If you're beats environment for example you'll want to fully understand whatenvironment Canada does, what it's different branches are responsible for, what itsauthority is under federal law, and what other government departments are involvedon the same files. Energy and environmental issues are often closely linked forexample.Likewise trade and environment as we've seen with the asbestos situation. Thismeans that the environment reporter has more to worry about than just onedepartment. He or she may in fact need to go hunting in other departments as well.And making a formal access request to several departments asking for the same kindof information can often be an effective strategy. If nothing else, it will speed up orshould speed up the consultation process among departments and agencies.Consultation is often an excuse for delay.

So let's say you've just been assigned to the Parliamentary Bureau and your bossTina Spencer has said she wants you to cover the foreign affairs and foreign policybeats. Obviously you'll need to know about the Department of foreign affairs andinternational trade over in the Pearson building on Sussex. But so much of Canada'sforeign policy also involves military operations you will also need to have somefamiliarity with the Department of national Defense and the Canadian forces.

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Open sources

Where to begin?

The government phone book is not a bad place to begin. You can see how thedepartment is organized and get a good idea idea of the range of its activitiesby flipping through it. The names of individuals may not be important. Officialsmove around a lot. You can get the latest listings for an individual bureaucratthat will be more current if you go to the GEDS site -- that's the governmentemployee directory service site and the link to it if you don't have it alreadybookmarked is on the workshop page at reportinglab.com

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Follow the money

Once you've done your first reconnaissance in the phone book you're ready toget into some greater detail by looking at the bluebook estimates and the info

source listings for each department.

The part two estimates are a way for you to follow the money. Always a goodinvestigative technique. The estimates can be a very rich source of storyideas. Particularly when you see how much money is being spent on programsthat you've never heard about before and your readers don't even know theyexist. The part three estimates are also good hunting ground. As you knowpart three estimates outline departmental performance reports and reports onplans and priorities.

What's sometimes a very interesting exercise is to examine the departmentsreports on plans and priorities for the current fiscal year and compare it tothose from previous years to see what's changed.

This is helpful not just when there's been a change of government but also inthe current situation to look at whether the government -- now that it has amajority -- is planning to go off in new directions in terms of policies or toabandon previous plans.

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Learn the lingo

Each government bureaucracy has its own jargon, its own nomenclature. Andwhile these may often be anodyne or even euphemistic they let you know as

the reporter how they keep their records. And you learn the lingo in theestimates.

This can speed up an access request if you can run it through their owngobbledygook translation machine.

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Corrections Part III Estimates -- http://www.tbs-

sct.gc.ca/rpp/2011-2012/index-eng.asp

http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/rpp/2011-2012/inst/pen/st-

ts01-eng.asp --

correction services Part III

Let's take a look for a second at correctional services Canada and it's part three estimates. You'll seehere a box of upcoming internal audits. Does anybody here cover corrections Canada?

I think this will be an interesting beat under the Harper government given its law and order agenda. Herewe see there is an internal audit called audit of practices to prevent/respond to deaths in custody. It's aperformance assurance audits. And look at this? It's due to be completed in just a couple of weeks,November of this year. Armed with this information, you might actually be able to fill in a few blanks andget a story out of it if you can find out when it began why the audit was planned and whether theyexpected me to their completion dates. If they're going to miss the completion dates for example theremust be a reason and if you can pry that reason out of the ministers office or less likely someone in thebureaucracy you've got the making of the story. At the very least you know but you don't want Novemberto slip into December before you file an access request for the audit of practices to prevent deaths incustody.

The 3rd box down says audits of release detention process and it was to be completed last monththere's one for the picking right now.

The part three estimates also show there are a number of evaluations that are to take place over a three-year period. Evaluations are generally broader in scope then audits. But there are a number of them

here that look interesting.The evaluation for the strategic plan for aboriginal corrections is due next month. Here's another one Ifound scrolling down dealing with spiritual services and correctional interventions. What's that all about?There is to be an evaluation completed by March 2014, so it can't be that pressing an issue. Or maybe itis and this completion dates are really just a way to kick the can down the road.

At any rate you are armed with information to begin your search.

If you click through from the correction services part 3 estimates page you eventually get a link to atreasury Board page that will give you a summary of capital spending 5 program activity for correctionalservices and you can see here the current fiscal years planned spending for the custody program isabout $235 million more then it was in the last fiscal year and you can see numbers projected out to2012 to 2014 so were going to see a lot of money being put into the cost of the program, The custodyprogram is prisons.You can see no growth is projected whatsoever in spending on capital programs for community

supervision.

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Border Serviceshttp://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agence/reports-

rapports/ae-ve/2009/assia-aeasr-eng.html -- border

services evaluation report

Take a look for second at this evaluation study done at Canadian borderservices on their admissibility screening and intelligence activities. Now this is

a bit dated July 2009.

Go to the key conclusions and recommendations management response andyou discover there are a lot of things wrong here.

An important thing to remember is when you are looking at documents like thisinternal audits or evaluation reports these are not finished products that justsuddenly appear on the designated deadline date.

There is a whole process that goes on and that process in itself generates

records that are accessible under the act. So very often a report like this it'sreally only a starting point to look for document suggesting what peoplethought the problem was in advance, what the mandate was of the peoplewho were doing the evaluation, and the back-and-forth that takes place atmeetings and you can find these in things like minutes or reports of meetings.Sometimes the transactions are by e-mail and these also are records that canbe accessed under the act.

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Meetings

What is one of the most common activities of bureaucrats? How aboutmeetings? They love meetings. Departmental committees, intergovernmental

task forces, you name it. My friend John Ibbitson says meetings are an excusenot to work. And bureaucrats love meetings.Youll learn to love them too because they generate many records.Think of it. There are terms of reference for the group, agendas, briefingbooks, talking points, proposals, minutes, records of decision, work plans,follow up memos. So if you know some group in government is working onsomething that interests you ask for all of these things from their meetings.

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Mandatory exemptions

Exemptions

Let's talk the bit about the things that are more difficult to get your hands on because of the statutoryexemptions in the act. Some of these things may rankle you as a journalist, but even hardened veterans

of Ottawa political coverage come to understand that some of these actually make sense in particularcircumstances.The act talks about 2 kinds of exemption, mandatory and discretionary.

The most significant mandatory exemptions are Cabinet confidence. So this is a classes basedexemption. The record has to fall within that class and if it does the exemption is mandatory.

Cabinet ministers get a flood of paper or digital material on issues that come before cabinet committeesor full cabinet. Meetings. Remember? This material comes generally speaking in two parts. Factualbackground material. And secondly a recommendation to cabinet for a decision. Under the act you areentitled to see the background material once a decision has been reached and announced publicly. Or ifa decision has been reached but not been made public you can access the background material afterfour years. Think of it.The Harper government is now in its fifth year? Got any ideas about things they did four or more yearsago?

This is also a good reminder that we need to follow our own stories. The follow ups are often moreinteresting than the first quick news hit.

In addition to Cabinet confidences, there are a few more mandatory exemptions.

Information obtained in confidence from a foreign country an international bodies like the UN or NATO,provincial governments a municipal government or an aboriginal governments.

As a quick aside, if an issue has a fed-prov angle to it use the provincial access acts to get their take onissues. Likewise with municipalities. A lot of the most recent stuff about government spending in hisriding on G-20 gazeboes etc. came from email accessed under municipal access law.

Other mandatory exemptions include personal information about an individual other than the individualwho made the request, information belonging to 3rd parties that contains trade secrets or scientific ortechnical secrets, third-party investment information, and records resulting from policiang arrangements

between provinces and the RCMP Mandatory exemptions also include records from a variety ofinvestigations ranging from from police investigations to investigations by the Commissioner oflobbying, and investigations by the public sector integrity Commissioner.

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Discretionary exemptions

The discretionary exemptions, are those subject to an injury test. These include records dealing withfederal provincial affairs, international affairs and defense, law-enforcement, security, investigationsunder the elections act, safety of individuals, purity clearances, information collected by correctionsCanada or the parole board about an individual who is under sentence, records dealing with the

economic interests of Canada, advice, testing procedures, tests and audits, internal audits, medicalrecords and solicitor client privilege,.Remember the second category is discretionary and that means the head of the agency, and that usuallymeans the deputy minister, has the discretion to release the material if he or she believes there is agreater good with disclosure them any harm that might result from disclosure.

Sadly the history in Canada has been that Deputy ministers kind of think information belongs to themand to their officials and so in practice in the 1st instance these discretionary exemptions are almostalways invoked.

Even when there's been a change in the government. Some of you may remember the shouting match Igot into with Harper shortly after he was sworn in because the Privy Council Office wasnt releasingdocuments about Liberal David Dingwalls lobbying activities.

Under Paul Martins government the PCO invoked solicitor-client privilege because a justice departmentlawyer was at meetings where the Dingwall case was discussed. And Kevin Lynch, the clerk of the privy

council, had his fingerprints all over the files.

So even if a new government can benefit politically from the release that impulses often stymied by thepermanent government, the mandarins, the bureaucracy.

But what's important for you to know is that if a discretionary exemption is invoked that decision can bereviewed by the information Commissioner's office. In other words an independent authority has theability to look at the records and decide whether or not the discretion has been applied correctly.

And you as a requester can also challenge a decision by the information commissioners office if youthink they've got it wrong. You can take the case to the federal court for decision.The law describes the injury test this way information the disclosure of which could reasonably beexpected to be injurious to the proper workings of government or national security or federal provincialrelations and so on.

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Injury Test

The Commissioner's office has adopted as its own policy very stringent injury test.Their policy says that the mere fact an exemption exists does not require us to applyits to records. Rather if the harm caused by the release of the record is identifiable

and imminent and this can be documented, then the discretionary exemption shouldbe applied otherwise the records should be released.So a three question test. Is injury identifiable? Is it imminent? Can it be documented?Thats a tough standard.But even if the bureaucrats can say yes to all three questions they can be trumped ifthere is a greater public good to be served by release.The information Commissioner's manual, which is something of a compilation of bestpractices, elaborates. It says that discretion should always be in favor of disclosure.In other words, there is a presumption of release being in the public interest.In other words, information belongs to the public not the bureaucrats. We bought it.We own it.

The general purpose of the act is to provide access to information.

.The wording of the exemption and the interest which the provision is attempting toprotect or balance to be taken into consideration.

In doing a review, the information commissioner also has to take a look at the contentof the document. Such as the nature of the information of the record and why wascreated in the 1st place, the specificity of the information, the context or confidentialityof the information, whether the issue is current. The age of the record can indicatethat's it is no longer injurious. There is also the possibility of partial disclosure of therecord, which is known as the severance.

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Severance

This is a fairly common sense approach to the analysis. Unfortunately over theyears have been to many bureaucrats spending too much time trying to figure

out how to get certain kinds of documents covered by exemptions. So you'llsee little tricks from time to time like policy discussions going on within agovernment group ad hoc task forces or other assemblage with thedepartment's lawyer present. And lawyer is the official recordkeeper. This maybe true even if it's not an issue that's being dealt with does not have a legalcomponent to it. But the solicitor client privilege exemption is invoked anyway.Cute.

What you might do in a case like that is to to ask for severance of materialsuch as a record of the names and positions of the people who attend ameeting with the lawyers. Chances are they've lall eft the meeting with notes

there own, even simple handwritten notes, and you can access those underthe act. They may also have written an e-mail to their boss or to colleaguesdescribing the meeting and its outcomes and those e-mail records are coveredby the act.

StrategicYou have to think long-term if you want to be successful using the access act.We have a little joke at the Carleton J-school that we should have all our first-year undergrads file access to information requests the first term so theyllhave material to write about when they get to the fourth years.You have to be strategic in what you request in deciding whether or not to

appeal a decision to refuse information and looking for information in otherplaces.

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All governments lie. -I.F. Stone Writing it down doesnt make it true

There needs to be a word of warning for journalists. We are in the truthbusiness. We try to verify facts. And we therefore have to understand that's

words on a piece of paper or in a digital format like an e-mail are really factsonly in the sense that they are evidence that the documents exist. In otherwords, don't believe everything you read even if it is in the governmentdocuments. I have seen time and again in Canadian records, reports, and allkinds of material coming to light that had very little resemblance to the truth. Inmy own experience I go back as far as the McDonald commission of inquiryinto the RCMP. Mounties produced a heck of a paper trail but they lied to eachother and they lied to their bosses. Many of those bosses did not really wantcandor.

So always keep in mind that a record is only a starting point and theinformation contained in it may very well have to be subjected to additionalverification.This is particularly true with documents that are giving an assessment of asituation or of an individual. We've seen in recent years how there were allkinds of documents circulating within the Department of foreign affairs and theRCMP suggesting that Maher Arar was involved in terrorist activities. We knowfrom the O'Connor commission of inquiry that in fact those allegations had nosubstance. Nevertheless there were some journalists who believed thatbecause something was written down on an official document it was probablytrue.So this is just a word of caution.

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Work your beat

You have to be strategic. And be prepared that any one particular inquiry maytake a very long period of time. But if you are well organized and have a lot ofpatience you can build a career out of this kind of work. I'm thinking inparticular of your own colleague David Puglese, and Jim Bronskill and DeanBeebee at Canadian press. Hell, Jim is still finding stories in the RCMP files ofTommy Douglas.

Work your beat. You should begin with a survey of open source information.There is a lot of information already out there available online or ingovernment reading rooms.

So start with those government departments that are of greatest interest toyou and see what you can find on the website. They all are supposed to haveon their website a tab or a link described as proactive disclosure. TreasuryBoard guidelines tell the departments that they should not have to wait for anaccess request to put certain kinds of information up on their website.

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Proactive disclosures

This includes the hospitality expenses of ministers and senior officials.Contracts worth more than $10,000. And job reclassifications. Someone overat treasury Board a few years ago thought these are areas most often open toabuse and one of the ways to deter abuse was to make this informationavailable proactively on a website.You learn all kinds of interesting things by looking at expense accounts, forexample. These are posted quarterly on government websites. At the foreignaffairs website you can check out John Baird's travels. The interesting stuffmay not in fact be how much he spent for dinner in Washington but rather whohe met in Washington. I've actually done this with Baird and discovered the

last time he was in Washington he met with the very powerful pro-Israeli lobbyorganization which has enormous influence with the US government. He alsomet with a group of Syrian dissidents. The public record doesn't give muchdetail but armed with even this little bit of information you can begin to askquestions that might produce stories. And it was there in plain sight.

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Use your contacts

It helps if you have an inside source who can kind of guide you to informationthat's already available. I had one official a few years ago who was concerned

about improper lobbying to obtain grants for high-tech research anddevelopment.He told me of where to look and what to look for and most of the stuff waspublicly available in various places, including the lobbyists registration, andwhat appeared the time to be obscure notes in a report by the auditor general.So as you're working your beat and you've developed a bit of a relationshipwith people in the department you might tell them that there are ways they canhelp you without actually having to be in the strict sense a whistleblowerthemselves. They may not the comfortable giving you copies of documents la wiki leaks. But they may be willing to sketch out a roadmap for you were you

can find what it is you're looking for.

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Plant seeds

As I've already noted the use of the access to information act is declinedamong journalists in recent years. But I think there are good reasons for that.

We've been through a series of minority governments, elections, leadershipconventions, confidence votes, coverage of a war in Afghanistan. So nationalreporters and in particular those working here in Ottawa have had a lot tocover at a time when frankly resources are shrinking and the demands on youin terms of producing for other platforms have been growing.Now, however, might be a good time to start to get strategic and start to usethe access act because we know but there's not going to be on electionanytime soon. So now is the time to settle in and the plant some seats forharvesting over the next few years.

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Drill down http://www.infosource.gc.ca/emp/emp04-

eng.asp#chapters - InfoSource list of institutions

Take a look at what's already available not just in the proactive disclosuressection of a departments website but also in the part 2 and part 3 of the

departmental budget estimates, and the info source listing of governmentactivities. Info source is one of the links our workshop webpage atreportinglab..com

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Reading rooms

You might cultivate some sources as well within public service unions. There alwaysseems to be somebody from the union representing border services and the unionrepresenting people at corrections Canada who will try to be friendly with reporters.

They might tell you where bodies are buried. Or help you understand jargon andeuphemisms that you cannot decode. And they also stay in close contact withrecently retired people. And those recently retired individuals no longer have to worryabout losing their job and they might be extremely helpful.

Departments and agencies are also required under the act to have a public readingroom. And those reading rooms are the repositories for the department's manuals,policy and procedures and amendments to policies and guidelines and procedures.

You might very well discover an interesting back story if you notice that there hasbeen an amendment to a policy. What's behind that amendment? Why is it showingup now? There must be a reason. It may be the reason is very newsworthy. Andagain were still talking about open source material here.

Until about a year or so ago the government had a central registry at treasury Boardof all access to information requests that had been dealt with across government. Forreasons I still don't understand the government shut it down. But individualdepartments are now expected to post links to completed access requests and this isto occur sometime in 2012.

Some government departments have already done that and you can find completedrequests listed on their website. I presume the others will actually meet the 2012deadline. The bureaucrats actually like this. They figure that if people know what'salready out there they want have to deal time and again with the same request forthe same information.

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Triple A requests

Any and all

So, your request begins with a statement that you want to have access torecords under the access to information act. The 30-day clock starts to tick.

Use the word records. Records cover everything from emails to marginalnotes, to audio recordings, etc.Make it what I call a Triple A request. You want any and all records.

Try to narrow the time frame for the material you are seeking. This is why itsgood to know when internal committees meet or the deadlines for thecompletion of reports etc. This saves you time.

Ask other government departments for their material on the same topics. Inmany cases the primary department will tell you they need a time extension to

consult across agencies. This can be a delaying tactic. Multiple requests to allthe involved departments gets you out of the slow lane.

Remember, a departments plea for an extension for consultation purposesmust be made with the first 30 days. It must indicate exactly how long theythink they will need to consult. If they dont this can be deemed to be a refusalby the information commissioner and a violation of the act.

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Penalties

The penalties are all that great. If a civil servant obstructs the informationcommissioner he or she can be fined $1000. The only other penalties in the

act kick in if someone deliberately falsifies or destroys records to circumventlawful access. You can get two years and a $10,000 fine for that. But keep inmind, nobody has ever been prosecuted under the act. The accesscommissioner has taken the view that she cannot lay charges herself, but canrefer cases only to the Mounties to investigate or to the Attorney General todecide whether to prosecute.

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Documents

ATI-notesview