Access-to-information delays

The Access to Information Act gives anyone the right to government records and sets a clear promise: a response within 30 days, with extensions allowed only for specific reasons. It is the most literal "does government deliver?" test in this pillar — a deadline written into law, against which the government reports its own score. There is no clean international league table, because freedom-of-information regimes differ too much to rank side by side. So the benchmark is Canada against its own statute and against its own past. On both, the record is deteriorating: outside the one department that processes immigration files in bulk, fewer than half of requests now meet the 30-day deadline, less is being disclosed, and the watchdog still carries a backlog of unresolved complaints.

Every other Governing metric tests a service against a target the government set. Access to information is the purest version of the test, because the target is the law itself. Section 7 of the Act requires a response within 30 days; section 9 permits extensions for limited, specified reasons; and section 10(3) treats a missed deadline as a "deemed refusal" — a denial of the right. The honest reading of the federal numbers is awkward, because one department distorts the average. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada now receives roughly four out of five access requests in the entire federal system, most of them routine immigration-file pulls that close quickly. Strip IRCC out — as the Information Commissioner does — and the rest of the government's performance is far worse than the headline suggests, and getting worse.

The deadline the law sets, and the score

The cleanest delivery test is the statute's own clock. The Act's default is 30 days; an institution that needs longer must invoke a specific extension, and one that simply runs out the clock is in "deemed refusal." Measured against the deadline including permitted extensions, government-wide compliance excluding IRCC has slid from 78.4% in 2018–19 to 69.9% in 2023–24 — nearly a third of requests now answered late. Measured against the bare 30-day deadline, the picture is starker: outside IRCC, the share answered on time has fallen below half, to 46.8%.

Same statute, different departments: the institutional spread

The chart ranks the federal government's highest-volume access institutions — plus ACOA as the small-agency benchmark — by the share of requests they closed within legislated timelines in 2023–24, from TBS's institution-level statistical dataset. The spread runs from 100% to 35%. Volume is not destiny: CBSA cleared 91% on the second-largest caseload in government, while institutions with a tenth of its volume cleared half that rate.

The watchdog's backlog of unresolved disputes

When an institution misses the deadline or withholds records, the recourse is a complaint to the Information Commissioner. Her office inherited an inventory of more than 3,500 open complaints in 2018 — some over a decade old — and has worked it down through record caseloads to 2,191 by 31 March 2025, a roughly 40% reduction. That is genuine progress at the oversight end. But the inventory has not been eliminated, and it spiked in 2021–22 and 2022–23 when prospective immigrants' representatives flooded the office with delay complaints. The backlog is shrinking because the watchdog is clearing files faster than they arrive — not because the underlying delays at departments have been fixed.

A system carrying ever more, ever later

Behind the timeliness numbers is a volume problem. The total stock of access requests in the federal system — new plus carried over — reached its highest level of the Commissioner's mandate in 2023–24. The share of requests carried over from earlier years climbed to 30.1%, the highest of the mandate: nearly a third of the workload at any moment is a request the system already failed to clear on time. At some departments the rot is concentrated — roughly 90% of National Defence's backlog was more than two years old. Volume growth is real, but it is not an excuse: the request count is a known, plannable workload, and the deadline is the same for all of it.

Findings

Sources & methodology