I recently received copies of some of the House Cards prepared last spring for Treasury Board President Vic Toews.
One of the House Cards, prepared by Treasury Board Senior Communications Strategist Fanny Lemieux (and approved by TBS Chief Information Officer Ken Cochrane), addresses the the complaint that, because complaints about the Access to Information system have doubled, the government must be restricting access.
Lemieux's suggested response for Toews is, not surprisingly, to let him know that “… the government has been effective, accessible and transparent” with requests.
Lemieux then includes this remarkable paragraph in the background for Toews:
“At a … meeting of the [Access to Information] communty in February 2008, Ms. Andrew Neill, Assistant Commissioner, stated that 60 per cent of complaints are made by 10 complainants. For example, the CBC refers to an article in which a frequent requester stated that since September 2007, he made 448 requests to the CBC and since he was not satisfied with the responses, he filed 524 complaints with the Information Commissioner concerning those requests. The same individual makes about 1,200 requests for information each year to various organizations.”
That can't be cheap. You must pay $5 for each request you submit. So that's $6,000 a year asking the government questions! Wow.
On a related note, my friend Gloria Galloway describes the Brazil-like world that is the federal ATI system …
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