2014-2015 Infrastructure Canada

Overall performance^{Footnote 1}

Infrastructure Canada (INFC) improved the number of requests completed within 30 day by 51.4% despite a large increase in the number of requests of 2,318.4%^{Footnote 2} (from 38 to 919). This report provides comparative statistics for the last three periods (2012-2015).

Workload

INFC received 919 requests under the Access to Information Act (the Act), representing 1.4% of total requests across government in 2014-2015. In 2013-2014, INFC received 38 requests. The majority of requests received by INFC in 2014-2015 were from the media (87.7%).We note that the number of media requests increased from 12 in 2013-2014 to 806 in 2014-2015.

INFC completed 831 requests this reporting period. The completion rate^{Footnote 3} was 89.2%, which is above the government-wide rate of 85.1%. In 2013-2014, INFC’s completion rate was 79.4%. INFC also received 19 informal requests in 2014-2015, all of which were completed within 30 days. The number of consultations received by INFC from other federal government institutions decreased from 82 to 27, representing a decrease of 67.1% compared to 2013-2014.

The total number of pages processed this reporting period was 326,696, a stark increase from the 15,430 pages processed in 2013-2014. The average number of pages processed per completed request increased from 417 in 2013-2014 to 4,083 in 2014-2015.

The information released by INFC was mostly in paper format: 50 in paper format and 23 in electronic format. In 2013-2014, 36 requests were released in paper format and no requests were released electronically.

Table 1. Workload

Request completion time

Timeliness

Figure 1 reveals that 93.4% of requests were completed within 30 days or less, which is 51.4% higher than the results observed in 2013-2014. We note that in 2014-2015, 90.1% of completed requests had a “no record exists” response, which explains the high percentage of requests completed within 30 days or less.

Figure 1: Request completion time

Extensions

INFC took a total of 43 extensions in 2014-2015 compared to 44 in 2013-2014. The most common reason for taking an extension was third-party notice (46.5%), followed by consultations (39.5%).

Figure 2 shows that all extensions taken in 2014-2015 were for more than 30 days: 27.9% of these extensions were taken between 31 and 60 days, which is 2.9% higher than the previous year; 32.6% were extended between 61 and 120 days, which is higher by 5.3% compared to 2013-2014.

Figure 2: Length of extensions

Deemed refusals

In 2014-2015, the number of requests closed past the statutory deadline^{Footnote 4} was 13, which accounts for 1.6% of completed requests. This rate represents an “A” grade.^{Footnote 5} The reason for overdue requests was entirely attributed to workload.

Disclosure

Percentage of requests for which information was disclosed

In 2014-2015, 2.4% of completed requests were entirely disclosed, which represents a decrease of 9.6% from 2013-2014 (see Figure 3). Figure 3 also shows that the rate for partially disclosed requests was 6.4% in 2014-2015 compared to 60.0% the previous period. This is due to the high proportion of requests for which no records existed (90.1%) in 2014-2015.

Figure 3: Level of disclosure

Exemptions

The average number of exemptions used per completed request was 0.30 in 2014-2015 compared to 4.62 the previous year. However, it is worth noting that a large number of requests were without record, therefore the average number of exemptions in 2014-2015 may not be a strong indicator (see Table 2).

The most common exemptions in 2014-2015 were section 18 (Economic Interests of Canada) (25.3%), section 21 (Operations of Government) (20.9%), followed by section 20 (Third-Party Information) (12.0%) and section 13 (Information Obtained in Confidence) (11.2%). The number of exemptions applied under all these provisions increased from the previous year.

Table 2: Exemptions

Complaints at the OIC

In 2014-2015, the OIC received 8 complaints^{Footnote 6} against INFC. 6 were administrative and 2 were refusals, 1 complaint was not well-founded, and 5 were discontinued.