Trash pickup. Bus routes. Snow clearing. Libraries, pools, parks.
The municipal governments behind Canada’s cities, towns and villages play an outsize role in people’s day-to-day lives. A federal immigration policy change can take years to be felt in a community, after all, but if the garbage truck doesn’t show, you’re likely to notice.
Much like their federal and provincial counterparts, municipalities across the country must adhere to freedom of information (FOI) laws, which are intended to promote transparency by allowing individuals to request documents from public institutions. These laws require institutions to disclose requested information with limited exceptions.
But a Globe and Mail audit of Canada’s 53 largest municipalities has found vast differences in how local governments perform on FOI. While they completed access requests in 25 days, on average – twice as fast as provincial and territorial ministries, and more than three times as quickly as federal departments – some cities still took much longer, including Edmonton (69 days), Hamilton (66) and Greater Sudbury (50). The audit also reveals that some municipalities apply redactions much more heavily than others. Mississauga, for instance, released 78 per cent of its files in full – that is, without any redactions whatsoever. Halifax, by comparison, released just 2 per cent of its files in full.
To assemble this national picture of municipal access performance, The Globe filed requests to every municipality in Canada with a population of at least 100,000 people, asking for data on FOIs completed between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023. The findings reflect the performance of 53 municipalities across eight provinces. (Three additional cities – Thunder Bay, Lévis, Que., and Ajax, Ont. – were excluded from the analysis because they said they had no FOI tracking system, claimed they could not produce the requested information or provided incomplete data.)
The audit was conducted as part of Secret Canada, a national Globe and Mail investigation that examined the country’s dysfunctional access systems and found that public institutions are routinely breaking access laws. These institutions violate statutory time limits, overuse redactions and claim no records exist when they do – and face few, if any, consequences for ignoring the precedents set by courts and information commissioners. Last year, a Secret Canada audit of FOI requests to federal, provincial and territorial ministries found that they managed to complete only half of their requests within 30 days. (By default, most jurisdictions require a file to be completed within this time frame, though FOI laws allow for time extensions in certain circumstances.)
The Globe chose to audit municipal governments’ FOI performance because of their close relationship to the public.
To Kevin Walby, a criminology professor at the University of Winnipeg who also studies freedom of information, some of the audited municipalities’ performance was “just abysmal – like, their FOI offices should be put into receivership, or something like that.”
“Some of the lack of compliance is just totally wild,” he continues. “There aren’t a lot of sites where you get great compliance. Great compliance, I think, would be where you have most of the records released in full, and most of the disclosures released within 30 days, or in a reasonable time.” Prof. Walby says the findings are evidence that some municipalities haven’t adequately resourced their FOI offices. “It’s a really contradictory message for an apparatus of the state to be sending: You guys comply with all these other laws, but we don’t have to follow the laws that pertain to us.”
“How do they expect Canadians to want to believe in the legitimacy of the state and believe in these kinds of transparency initiatives when you see this kind of lack of compliance across the board?”
Kristan Cook, former FOI director for the City of Edmonton, says cities have much smaller teams to handle requests for information, but must be held to the same standards as other levels of government.Megan Albu/The Globe and Mail
Kristan Cook, a former FOI director for Edmonton, says municipalities make decisions that “actually affect” people’s day-to-day lives. “It’s people wanting to know, why is my bus route changing? How much did this bridge cost? Why is the train going through my yard?”
Ms. Cook, who is now the director of privacy at PBC Solutions, a health benefits technology company, says that Canada has thousands of municipal governments across the country, and despite their varying sizes, they follow the same access rules as higher levels of government. “Whether you’re a government administration of three people or 300, that three-person government administration still has to provide the same service under FOI.”
Municipalities handle FOI very differently from provincial or federal governments: City clerks usually act as ranking officials on FOI matters, and local governments tend to have fewer layers of review – that is, fewer people who need to approve the release of a document – before an FOI response goes out the door, which likely speeds up the process, Ms. Cook says.
The FOI requests received by municipalities are also very different from those going to the provinces or federal government. “So many dog bites, like, an incredible number of dog bites,” Ms. Cook says. “Fire inspections, that’s a big one. And then requests about infrastructure, things like bridges and buildings and mass transit – those have a very municipal flavour.”
The Secret Canada website, which allows users to search through hundreds of thousands of completed FOI requests across the country, was recently updated to include summaries for requests at the federal, provincial, territorial and municipal level. To browse the database and learn more about the Secret Canada project, visit www.secretcanada.com.
Here are some highlights from The Globe’s municipal FOI audit.
Timelines
While audited municipalities took an average of 25 days to respond to a request, coming in under the 30-day benchmark The Globe used last year for its examination of federal and provincial ministries, the timeliness of individual municipalities varied greatly.
Quebec City and Longueuil, Que., both closed FOI files within 12 days, and managed to complete virtually all requests they received within a 30-day period. Edmonton (69 days), Hamilton (66), Greater Sudbury, Ont. (50) and Toronto (49), meanwhile, were the slowest.
Unsurprisingly, the municipalities that took the longest, on average, to respond to requests also managed to close a much smaller share of their requests within 30 days. Despite taking an average of 37 days to close their requests, Richmond, B.C., completed just 36 per cent of its FOIs within a month, meaning nearly two-thirds of requests took longer than the benchmark.
Ms. Cook says that these contrasts in timeliness often come down to records management practices.
“If you don’t know where your records are, then you can’t locate them and you can’t respond to an FOI request,” she says.
“Organizations of a significant size have hundreds of systems that store records. Some of these systems talk to each other, and some of them don’t. So it really depends on where the information is stored and how easy it is to gather the information and put it into the form that an applicant is seeking.”
Extent of redactions
After assembling the documents relevant to a request, FOI offices read through the records to identify information that must be redacted under access law. Some responses are released as-is, without redactions, while others can be withheld in their entirety. The final status of an FOI package, also known as its “disposition,” is a useful indicator of how much information a public institution is actually releasing.
Mississauga released 78 per cent of its FOI responses without any redactions whatsoever, the highest full disclosure rating for any major Canadian municipality. Halifax, meanwhile, released just 2 per cent of its files in full.
(Some of these disclosure statistics are complicated by the types of FOIs they are processing. Winnipeg, for instance, also processes files for the Winnipeg Police Service, and police requests often carry personal information redactions. The Globe’s analysis aimed to measure how municipalities were responding to their requests, so it kept the request data it received mostly as-is, removing only FOIs that were abandoned or transferred to another public institution.)
Ms. Cook says that the variation in how extensively local governments redact records could be read many ways. Take a city that has high full disclosure rates: “Maybe it’s an organization that believes in transparency, or maybe it’s an organization that isn’t paying attention,” she says. Meanwhile, a municipality with high redaction rates may be “more on the cautious side of releasing information.”
Levels of government, compared
Overall, municipal governments outperformed federal, provincial and territorial ministries across all FOI metrics in the audit. They closed requests more rapidly – 25 days on average, compared with 47 provincially/territorially and 83 federally – and completed the lion’s share of their files within 30 days. Municipalities also released files in full much more frequently: 38 per cent of the time, compared with 20 per cent provincially and 24 per cent federally.
To Ms. Cook, these differences can be explained in large part by the complexity of a public institution’s bureaucracy. People empowered to make final FOI decisions – the ones given “delegations of authority” – often have more levels of oversight at the provincial and federal level, she says, slowing down the process considerably.
“In some delegations, the people who are actually the people that you’re talking to when you’re doing the access request, they have the authority to sign something and send it out to you themselves,” she says. “In other places, they don’t. So, any time you have that – more people, more levels – the amount of time that it’s going to take for you to get something is going to increase. That’s a really important difference between municipal, provincial and federal.”
Transparent cities
While several municipalities fared well in this audit, some stood out for how quickly and fulsomely they responded to requests. Red Deer, Alta., and Mississauga released more than 70 per cent of their files in full, and managed to do so while keeping FOI responses to an average of 22 and 23 days, respectively.
Nearly every request completed by Longueuil, Que., within the audit window was closed within 30 days – despite the municipality having completed more than 1,500 requests during the period.
Several Quebec municipalities achieved exceedingly fast completion times. Montreal wrapped up FOIs in an average of 15 days; Gatineau closed files in 13 days, on average, and Quebec City and Longueuil averaged 12 days.
Speaking for Gatineau, Cynthia Lauzon said the administration was “proud of this result,” and that it was “important to highlight the diligent work of all the people in the access to information unit who help respond to these requests.” Gonzalo Nunez with Montreal said that the city aimed for an “average processing time” of 18 days in 2023.
Opaque cities
Winnipeg and Greater Sudbury, Ont., both notched a particularly low full disclosure rate of 7 per cent – far short of the 38 per cent average across all municipalities.
April Low, a spokesperson for the City of Greater Sudbury, largely attributed the city’s high rate of partial disclosures (78 per cent) to personal information redactions, particularly for requests regarding building permits, bylaw complaints and fire services.
A spokesperson for Winnipeg, meanwhile, said the municipality’s low full disclosure rate is tied to the fact the city processes requests for the Winnipeg Police Service. In an e-mail, David Driedger said that 50 to 70 per cent of the city’s FOIs are police-related, and that 90 per cent of those are “requests from individuals for copies of their police reports,” most of which carry some level of redaction.
While Halifax registered the lowest full disclosure rate, at 2 per cent, it also stood out on another metric: The east coast capital responded to more than two-thirds of its requests by saying there were no records whatsoever. The municipal average was 22 per cent.
Laura Wright, a Halifax Regional Municipality spokesperson, echoed Greater Sudbury, pointing to personal information redactions. Ms. Wright said that a “no records” response didn’t necessarily mean there were no records whatsoever – only that there were no records responsive to what had been requested.
Hamilton had the second-slowest average response time (behind Edmonton), but it also ranked poorly across other metrics: It closed 40 per cent of its files within 30 days (third-worst, after Richmond, B.C., and Saguenay, Que.) and released 19 per cent of its files in full (13th-worst).
In a e-mailed statement, Hamilton city clerk Matthew Trennum said the municipality “takes its role as a steward and guardian of personal and confidential information very seriously,” and that Hamilton is “looking to invest in modernized freedom of information request tracking software to assist in managing timelines and more generally for project management.”
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