The Star has spent tens of thousands of dollars over the years on these kinds of Freedom of Information requests, trying to learn more about the decisions public officials make, the advice they receive, the details they’re keeping to themselves. Access to information — not just by news organizations but by all Canadians — is a cornerstone of the ability to hold governments accountable.

But is the system broken? Four Toronto Star reporters share their experiences in trying to get behind-the-scenes information about our public institutions.

Read more:

The high cost of accessing public records is a barrier to democracy, experts say

What it takes to get the results of a Freedom-of-Information request

Cost for information on Scarborough subway: $32,000 and a 3-year wait

Jennifer Pagliaro, City Hall Bureau

Is the system that governs our ability to access government information set up to fail?

Was it access or secrecy that politicians intended when the rules were written decades ago?

As it does every time an envelope arrives in the mail, that question has been troubling me since a bill for $32,000 landed on my desk.

The letter came from the TTC, requesting payment for the promise of documents on the Scarborough subway extension, which at more than $3.35 billion is the city’s most expensive infrastructure project.

Documents, the letter said, could take “close to three years” to process — documents that could still be heavily censored when they’re finally released.

I’ve been thinking about this question because while this is the most exorbitant fee estimate I’ve personally ever received — a sad record — the high cost for access, the extraordinary wait, and the censorship of information that should be easily obtained without sending a cheque is the norm, not the exception in this country.

Since arriving at city hall in mid-2014, I’ve tried to get to the bottom of how decisions are made, including when council voted to scrap a light-rail line fully-funded by the province in favour of a subway that would cost $2 billion more and serve far fewer people.

For three years, I have been requesting documents from the city, province and their transit agencies about that controversial plan.

The Star has spent nearly $4,500 to access public records — including emails, briefing notes and internal presentations — on subway-related requests. I’ve received more than 6,100 pages in all.

The stories those fulfilled requests have allowed me to tell include:

That information city staff provided to council in 2013 that influenced the switch to a subway was, according to the city’s chief planner, both “rushed” and “problematic.”

That a draft Metrolinx report sent to provincial officials but never released concluded the subway, compared to the LRT, was “not a worthwhile use of money.”

That an updated cost estimate for the subway will be ready before the 2018 election, but won’t be made public until 2019.

That access hasn’t been without a wait that sometimes renders the information irrelevant — in one case nearly two years before all the records in a request were received — at a cost some media outlets can no longer afford, and with information blacked out that appeals to a watchdog have done nothing to resolve.

What else does the public not know?

With council yet to vote on whether to go ahead with construction of the subway and in the midst of a debate that has been characterized by a lack of information and misinformation, access to information is vital.

I am grateful my editors believe so strongly in the public’s right to know and that we still have the resources to fight for this information.

But $32,000 is bill we cannot be expected to pay. The rules allow institutions to charge $30 per hour and other fees for processing.

So, I am left with the question of whether this system is one set up to legislate secrecy.

If so, it is operating just fine.

9 out of 10 requests turn out to be duds:

Alex Boutilier, Ottawa Bureau

Since I started tracking in October 2015, the Star’s Ottawa bureau has filed at least 515 access to information requests to federal departments and agencies.

That’s an average of 18 per month from a four-person team, and a total cost to the Star of at least $2,570 in application fees alone. You might think, given the volume, that we’d be swimming in top secret documents; an embarrassment of riches in government secrets.

You would be wrong.

Nine out of 10 Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) requests we file are duds, either not interesting or censored to oblivion. Once, an overzealous censor blacked out the “Canada” in the phrase “Government of Canada.”

Out of the one in 10 that returns interesting results, I’d say there’s about a 50-50 chance there’s a story that would interest our readers.

So why spend the time doing it?

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Honestly, I’ve asked myself that question plenty of times in the past. The ATIP system is broken, the number of requests are increasing and the delays to return even basic information can take months or years. I’ve given up on getting any information from the RCMP after they stopped bothering to respond to requests.

But without spending the time (and the Star spending the money), we wouldn’t know about serious concerns over Ottawa’s collection of Canadians’ private information, backlogs at the CBSA putting peoples’ residency claims at risk, or that officials were considering a tête-à-tête between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Russian President Vladimir Putin. We wouldn’t have been able to map Parks Canada’s crumbling infrastructure, reveal the “jaw-dropping” scale of police warrantless access, or publish Canada’s own assessment that UN peacekeeping has “glaring” accountability gaps, or show that border guards violated policy by subjecting American students to a mass strip search.

More broadly, we’d have to rely on the politicians telling us what they’re doing, rather than seeing — at least partially — for ourselves.

Too often, government response is denial rather than disclosure:

Robert Cribb, Staff Reporter

In May of 2015, I filed a federal access to information request to the RCMP seeking records in the public interest for the purposes of reporting their contents in this newspaper.

The police agency agreed the records fall under the disclosure requirements of the one piece of federal law designed to ensure the public’s right to know how governments act in their name, how public money is spent and how vital systems of safety and public protection are managed.

There was only one hitch: a $350 fee for the time and resources the agency required to produce the documents for release.

The Toronto Star paid that fee in July of that year.

In a followup letter confirming the payment, an RCMP official wrote: “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is committed to assisting you with your request and we will ensure that every reasonable effort is made to help you receive a complete, accurate and timely response.”

Three years later, those records have still not been released.

Repeated calls over the months and years have been met with no response, or delayed responses that can be accurately paraphrased as such: “We’re still working on it.”

The alter-world of Canada’s access to information system is surreal at the best of times. The release of hundreds of pages filled with blacked out text without any hint of what lies underneath or how to argue that it should be revealed; the fiction of 30-day deadlines within which the law promises responses; the tortured logic of civil servants justifying extortionate fees for records of obvious public interest; and the sometimes condescending arrogance of officials who push back disclosure for months — or longer — with impunity.

Over two decades of routine filing of these formal requests, I have spent more than $10,000 of the Toronto Star’s money to obtain records that helped us — after months or years of fighting — tell stories about abuse in daycares, food safety violations in restaurants, fraud and corruption in government, public safety risks in the air, soil and water, police handling of sexual predators, human traffickers and dangerous doctors, the scandal of offshore tax evasion and the impact of the oil industry on the environment and human health.

When we succeed in getting these records pried from the hands of secretive government officials, it is in spite of the transparency system in Canada, not because of it. Far too often, the default position of government officials is denial rather than disclosure. And by any measure, it’s getting worse.

It is a scandal that receives little attention or outrage outside of newsrooms and academic conferences. Because we don’t know what we don’t know. And that is a shame.

There is important information sitting in an RCMP hard drive awaiting release in response to that 2015 request. I have a feeling you’ll be interested in it. I just can’t tell you what it is. They’re still working on it.

Fees waived after ‘extreme delay’ on labour ministry file

Sara Mojtehedzadeh, Work and Wealth Reporter

Ontario’s Changing Workplaces Review, led by two government-appointed special advisers, resulted in the most sweeping set of reforms to Ontario’s labour laws in decades.

I wanted to know what had happened behind the scenes during the two-year-long process. Did the advisers meet with lobbyists? Which ones? What came out of the discussions?

So I filed a Freedom of Information request, received by the Ministry of Labour’s privacy office at the end of January 2017. In June — after the CWR advisers had already released their final report — I received an email explaining that there had been an “extreme delay” with my file because the officer in charge of it had left the office.

After subsequently paying a $200 deposit for the information and following up via email and phone for months with no result, I filed a complaint to the Information and Privacy Commissioner at the end of October, arguing that the extreme delay and lack of communication about missed deadlines constituted a deemed refusal of my request. I asked for the information to be released within two weeks and for my fees to be completely waived.

The complaint resulted in a settlement — I got my fees waived, and the documents released by the start of December. By this time, the legislation emerging from the Changing Workplaces Review had already passed at Queen’s Park. Some of the information I received was still relevant and interesting — it included background discussions on the quality of the evidence submitted by various lobbyists — but it was certainly less timely.

To be fair, human error happens. Plus, my request turned up a lot of records — 3,000 pages worth — and someone in government had to retrieve them all on top of their regular duties.

That being said, most reporters have numerous FOIs filed at different ministries at any given time. We have to put in research to write them, plus the subsequent work of chasing up assorted officials. We do that on top of our regular daily reporting duties, too, because transparency is important and in the public interest.