The RCMP interpretation of Canada’s Access to Information Act feels like Go Fish for reporters
The Canadian public is given such a small sliver of access to the RCMP.
I got the first email two weeks ago, on a Wednesday. It was 1:45 p.m. The last email landed in my inbox at 2:11 p.m. Six emails total, one every five minutes. They all start: “Good day, Please find attached our office’s response to your Access to Information Act request…”
Access to information Information and Privacy Act requests (sometimes shortened to ATIPs) are one of my favourite ways to wrestle basic information from the Mounties. Legally, anyone in Canada is entitled to make these requests.
For $5, you can ask for any government information you like. (They black some stuff out in the name of federal cabinet confidence, or if it’s “information that could be injurious to Canada’s security or economy, federal-provincial relations and international affairs,” but otherwise it’s supposed to be fair game.)
It’s a pretty key component to cutting through government messaging. Responses are due back within a month unless your request was tricky or wide-ranging or necessitated combing through thickets of highly sensitive files. Then, government agencies and departments can argue for more time to evaluate the files prior to release.
I believe in the spirit and value of ATIP, even if it is, as journalist Dean Beeby summarized, “widely regarded as outdated and in need of a major overhaul.” It’s better than nothing, I convince myself, even if it sometimes feels pretty close to nothing. I am a frequent flyer with the RCMP’s ATIP division. Wednesday was not the first time an inbox lull has given way to a mini deluge of responses.
If I was working full-time in a newsroom and five years younger, it’s hard to overstate how much this quick succession of bureaucratic synergy would have thrilled me. I can vividly picture past-me crowing in an assignment meeting that I had “fresh ATIPs” and surely one would yield some new information, leading to a front-page story that held someone or something to account.
These days I consider it a win if I get that email telling me my request has been dealt with in under a year. If the material is semi-usable? Hallelujah, we’ve hit the jackpot. Any complaint to the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) tends to result in my requests sitting in another queue for months.
Periodically, I receive public confirmation that my frustrations are valid and common, via reports released with damning statistics and dire warnings. In November 2020, the OIC offered a 30-page report chock-full of evidence that the RCMP suffers a persistent inability to respond to requests in a timely fashion. It noted, too, a “consistent failure” to explain all those delays when the OIC comes knocking.
Hell, the OIC revealed that the number of requests taking more than a year to respond to (they’re legally due in 30 days!) grew by more than 1,000 per cent from the 2016-17 to the 2018-19 reporting period.
To save my sanity, I’ve had to reframe my expectations of what information might be gleaned via an ATIP. Instead of expecting a buzzy, front-page scoop, I see these interactions as plot points on a larger story about transparency and accountability. Mostly, the story is about how bureaucratic and jargon-stuffed official RCMP communication can be, and how obfuscating the search for clarifying details can be (I don’t know that we journalists are very good at telling those stories).
Right before the Wednesday deluge, I received confirmation from the RCMP that it had found zero copies of Commissioner Bob Paulson’s internal communication. I submitted the ATIP in August 2020. It took them 14 months to tell me something that cannot be true: they found no evidence of any correspondence for a commissioner who held the rank from 2011 through 2017, through one scandal after another.
I replied by saying it was “a ridiculous overreach” — the RCMP keeps copies of personnel files for a long time, especially for senior-ranking members, making the idea that the force had precisely zero files on a commissioner whose barely been out of office a few years preposterous— and telling the person that I’d see them at the OIC when I filed a complaint.
To that, the RCMP told me they’d erroneously responded to my complaint to say they’d found nothing due to an “administrative error.” When I pushed, they said only that “the response you received previously should be disregarded.” Don’t worry, they assured me, they’re still working on the file.
How can I trust that?
As the OIC wrote: “There is clear evidence that the RCMP’s inability to meet statutory timeframes under the Act is the norm, not the exception.”
The Canadian public is given such a small sliver of access to the RCMP. Everywhere you look, there are barriers keeping people from knowing the truth, from understanding how bad a situation is and how repetitive the failings are. Last weekend’s news cycle was dominated by outrage over two journalists arrested by the RCMP while reporting from Wet'suwet'en. It isn’t the first time Mountie actions there have come under fire.
Without proper oversight, Canadians have nice words and (likely) empty promises with no actual means to do anything about it. It feels increasingly like we are allowed to know nothing, unless the best data points have been blacked out or otherwise reduced to meaninglessness.
I’m clearly not the only person hitting a bureaucratic wall. I’ve read this J-Source piece twice just for this Carlos Osorio quote about getting a brick wall any time he tried to get into hospitals to report on the extent of the pandemic.
“Sometimes it felt like screaming into the void,” he said. “We ask and they say no. That’s not a system — that’s just them dictating the policy.”
The piece goes on to explain how conspiracy theories flourish in the wake of that lack of information. With the Mounties, the stranglehold on information flow makes properly evaluating the RCMP’s actions hard. We know just enough to know we need to know more, but we have not been empowered to know more because the federal government hasn’t taken the initiative.
I suspect the Mountie mystique lives on through those information gaps. I said a version of that recently on CANADALAND. I talked about the evolution of my reporting, how it started with the cold case of Krystle Knott. It’s been more than a decade since her remains were discovered, but even with the signed consent of her guardian, an access to information request on her case has told me nothing.
What I’ve received is pages of media articles about her case. Krystle’s family has been without answers since her 2005 disappearance. It's been 16 years, and all the public is entitled to know about how our national police force handled the investigation is a bunch of photocopies of CBC articles.
Over time, the lack of information becomes the information, just as inaction is an action. But nearly seven years into this reporting adventure, the red serge wall feels more porous— even if I’m still writing stories like this one.