Getting the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s list of publicly funded goods and services contracts will cost you $20,825.

The B.C. Ministry of Transportation would like $98,603 to provide you with the number of cellphones used by its civil servants and how much they cost.

And if you want the details of secret deals universities have struck with their food and beverage suppliers, you’re largely out of luck.

These are among the findings of an annual audit of Canadians’ access to government-held information conducted by the Canadian Newspaper Association (CNA).

“All democracies are built on the basis of openness and transparency,” said John Hinds, president and CEO of the CNA.

“This year’s audit shows us that the system in Canada continues to be under strain, especially at the federal level. The concept of freedom of information has been eroded.”

Nearly half of the 314 formal requests to municipal, provincial and federal governments seeking records such as pandemic flu plans, trip expenses for senior officials and public land transactions were met with denials, fees and time delays reaching as long as half a year.

The feds were at the top of the secrecy scale, often failing to respond to requests within the legislated 30-day deadline and, in some cases, demanding dramatic fees to release records.

“At the federal, what we’re seeing is (government) performances declining year over year, not getting better,” said Suzanne Legault, interim federal information commissioner, whose recent report to Parliament warned that Canadians’ right of access is “at risk of being totally obliterated because delays threaten to render the entire access regime irrelevant.”

“We need leadership at the political and the institutional level, adequate resources and . . . legislative reform.”

Journalists, citizens and academic researchers have long expressed frustration over access to information of vital public interest — from spending of taxpayer dollars to public policy decisions to health threats and public safety issues — getting buried in bureaucratic intransigence.

“It’s a joke,” says Jeff Green, a Torontonian who fought a three-year battle under provincial freedom of information laws to obtain records he says never materialized.

After filing a misconduct complaint against a Toronto police officer, Green made a request in 2006 for records detailing what he believed to be improper use of police computers to search his personal information.

Green says his conflict with the officer began while they were living in the same condo building.

The matter is now the subject of an ongoing police disciplinary hearing.

After a series of lengthy negotiations and a formal appeal, the provincial information commissioner ordered police to release the records to Green last year.

But the documents, featuring long lists of computer printout data, amount to “a pile of gibberish,” says Green.

“Whatever information they provided would be the same as providing nothing. It’s an illusion of access to calm the masses.”

Bob Spence, a spokesperson for the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, said the average time for handling appeals is seven months.

“Obviously, we would like to see all appeals wrapped us as soon as possible, but sometimes it’s beyond our control.”

The CNA’s audit researchers had their own encounters with plodding and protective bureaucracies.

Universities, included in the audit for the first time, threw up perhaps the highest walls to public access.

Nine of 10 universities surveyed across Canada refused to release their full food and beverage contracts — generally exclusive deals with large food-service firms and soft drink companies. (Only the University of Toronto agreed to release its full contract for a fee of $22.20, the audit found.)

Confidentiality was the reason generally cited for denial of the records.

“We could not provide the actual contracts themselves (because) they were set up as confidential legal documents and contain competitive information,” said University of New Brunswick spokesperson Cynthia Goodwin.

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Last year, the Ontario Information Commissioner rejected a similar argument by Hamilton’s McMaster University and ordered the university to release contract records to the Toronto Star, stating McMaster “has not provided detailed and convincing evidence of harm.”

The typical government rationale for high fee assessments — reaching into tens of thousands of dollars — was the work required to compile the records.

“The nature of the request was very broad given the fact that CBC/Radio-Canada has an annual budget of $1.7 billion with operations across the country and abroad,” said CBC spokesperson Marco Dubé in response to the Crown Corporation’s $20,825 fee for a listing of contracts under $10,000.

An identical request to Canada Post produced a fee estimate of $20, the audit reported.

“Somehow there has to be a shift in the minds of citizens and their representatives that the civil servants work for us, not the other way around,” says Sharon Polsky, national chair of the Canadian Association of Professional Access and Privacy Administrators.

“If there’s no awareness among the public to generate even a grassroots objection to how our governments are becoming increasingly secretive, it’s deemed as acceptance. That is dangerous.”

Federal ministries logged the lowest overall performance grades assigned in the audit.

The 11 federal departments ranged from a B+ (Public Works) down to a D- for the Department of National Defence.

DND spokesperson Elana Aptowitzer says the department has been working to improve its compliance with the federal information law by increasing staff, providing training and expediting requests.

Twelve of the 18 extensions beyond the one-month time frame were claimed by federal institutions, the audit found.

One of those extensions rang in at six months.

“You can hardly call it an access (to information) regime when it takes six months or a year to obtain what you need,” said the report’s author, Halifax-based journalism professor Fred Vallance-Jones.

“There’s still a feeling that for many bureaucrats it’s more about processing paperwork than being there to encourage and promote access.”

Saskatchewan scored best among the provinces with a B+ grade. Ontario and B.C. shared the basement with D+ rankings.

Municipalities proved to be the most transparent level of government with some cities (Banff, Nelson, B.C., Brandon, Cornwall and Windsor) scoring A+ grades.

Robert Cribb is a reporter with the Toronto Star