Report shows no progress on speeding up FIPPA replies

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This article was published 11/11/2024 (355 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba government and public agencies received hundreds of fewer requests for internal data and documents last year, but one-third of all replies were still late and sent after the deadline was loosened to 45 days.

The 2023-24 annual report on the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, better known as FIPPA, was released last week.

It shows there’s been no progress on speeding up replies, no record-collection fees were waived during the latest fiscal year, and publicly funded authorities collected three times the total year-over-year fees to process requests.

“It’s a slow secrecy. They make people wait for it, until maybe they forget about it or until the information is irrelevant,” said Kevin Walby, director of the Centre for Access to Information and Justice at the University of Winnipeg.

“The more ‘slow secrecy’ goes up, the more (public) trust goes down.”

While calling FIPPA “a crucial dimension of democracy,” the criminal justice professor said the provincial government is failing to fund the system so it can function as intended.

Anyone can put in a request for records, be they department reports, meeting minutes or other information, at no cost in Manitoba. There is a free two-hour work period allotted for every request.

Provincial departments and agencies recorded 1,584 FIPPA requests from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024 — a 31 per cent drop from the previous fiscal year.

The justice, health and environment and climate change departments recorded the highest number of requests.

The recipients ended up completing 1,200 fewer year-over-year requests, owing to withdrawn, abandoned and out-of-scope submissions.

About four in 10 requests were granted, in part. Requests granted in full or fully denied because they did not exist each accounted for roughly one-quarter of decisions.

The remaining were rejected due to disclosure exceptions or because they were deemed frivolous, unduly repetitive, excessively broad or not made in good faith.

Public bodies must respond to an applicant’s request for information within 45 days, as per legislation that had required responses within a month. An updated version of the law came into force Jan. 1, 2022, to give authorities more leeway.

Last year, 69 per cent of eligible requests were met with on-time responses.

Sixteen per cent of responses were sent within 46 to 75 days, despite not having an authorized extension, and 15 per cent were issued even later, which is in contravention to the law.

That trend mirrors delays in the previous fiscal year, even though the 45-day timeline applied to 948 fewer requests in 2023-24.

The Manitoba ombudsman recommended public bodies assess their FIPPA team’s resource needs, including increasing the number of access and privacy officers, to comply with legislated time limits in a 2020 report.

“It’s time to acknowledge this staffing crisis and get to work on fixing it,” said Kyle Ross, president of the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union, on Wednesday.

The latest FIPPA report cites a drop in requests from political parties as the driving factor behind the overall decrease in demand for information.

Last year, during which the NDP was elected to government, these types of applicants submitted 17 per cent of all requests, compared with 56 per cent during the previous fiscal year when the NDP was in opposition.

The U of W’s Walby accused members of the official Opposition of not doing their job.

“A decrease in information requests is common when there is a change in government,” Matt Preprost, a spokesman for the Progressive Conservatives, said in an email.

“We will continue to use all avenues available to us, including FIPPA, question period, and the budget estimates process to bring transparency and accountability to this NDP government and its actions.”

Finance Minister Adrien Sala was not made available for an interview on the subject.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca