A suspicious cost analysis
The Trudeau government recently commissioned a study into the true costs of running the federal access-to-information system.
Management consultants EY (Ernst & Young LLP) toted up direct and indirect costs of processing all those requests each year, in a Sept. 27 report. They determined that the official total of $89.7 million for 2020-21 is much too low.
Instead, the real price tag was $195 million after adding the previously uncounted labour costs of all those public servants chasing down and reviewing documents. So instead of $5.20 to process each page of records, as official stats have it, the full cost is really $11.40.
What’s this exercise all about? Almost certainly, the government is preparing the ground for a hike in the $5 application fee.
We’ve seen this movie before. A few years ago, British Columbia hired Deloitte to conduct a cost study of its own freedom-of-information system. In a spring 2019 report, Deloitte toted up direct and indirect costs, and found the system much more expensive than official stats indicated.
The provincial government then cited the study last year to justify levying application fees for the first time, $10 per request. The measure was imposed with minimal consultation. Critics called it a tax on information.
The federal application fee has remained at $5 since 1983. Had it kept pace with inflation, the fee now would be $13. The Trudeau government in May 2016 eliminated all other access-to-information fees, such as photocopying, but retained the $5 application fee. Fee elimination in every other area appears to have triggered a flood of new requests, including monster requests of thousands of pages, because users bear almost no costs beyond that modest application fee.
My guess is that federal bureaucrats now are pushing back, looking to double the application fees to $10 or thereabouts. The extra revenue will do nothing to offset the rising costs of administering the Act. But a $10 application fee will certainly reduce the number of requests coming through the door. Higher fees in Ontario in the 1990s, and in Nova Scotia in the early 2000s, had that very effect. Fewer requests means lower costs and less labour from aggrieved public servants.
As to whether the EY report is a reliable indicator of true costs at the federal level, I have some serious reservations. The calculations do not take into account the archaic information-management systems of Ottawa, which make retrieval and processing of documents grossly inefficient. Public servants also have an incentive to overstate the time it takes them to fulfill requests. They may be venting frustrations about a system that genuinely overburdens them.
Reports like this one from EY almost always come with a hidden agenda. Users should brace themselves for higher application fees.
Dec. 16, 2022
