Secret Canada: We broke the printer twice

Hello! Tom Cardoso. As you may recall, my colleague Robyn Doolittle and I are the reporters behind Secret Canada, The Globe and Mail’s investigation into Canada’s broken freedom of information systems.

Our adept audience editors politely suggested that my last dispatch was a tad long, so I’m making an effort to keep it shorter this time around. Sorry Rebecca and Sam. (Note to self: Already at 60 words…)

We’ve got a bunch of new stuff for you this time around. Secret Canada’s database has been updated with new information, as well as blog posts. Take a look behind the scenes at our recent FOIs! A mailbag!

Let’s get into it.

We’ve got new stuff!

When we were nearing the launch of the Secret Canada website, we knew a bunch of public institutions weren’t going to make the cut – either because we’d yet to receive their data or because their files required more manual cleaning. We told ourselves we’d add these new institutions as quickly as we could.

Over the past month, we’ve made three such additions. We now have completed freedom of information request data for three hospital and health care organizations: the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and SickKids hospitals, both in Toronto, and B.C.’s Provincial Health Services Authority.

Click on the image to view it in gallery

We’ve also published several new stories to our FOI news blog, including pieces from our colleagues Alexandra Posadzki and Molly Hayes. Alex Hayes wrote about her attempts to convince the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to release statistics on phone number scams. Molly, meanwhile, recounted her years-long struggle (emphasis on “struggle”) with the Toronto Police Service to obtain data on 911 call wait times.

Finally, Robyn made an appearance on CTV’s Social Media – sporting a Secret Canada purple suit! – to talk about the project.

Fixing FOI

Whenever Robyn and I work on an investigation, we know it’s not enough to just report on the problems with a system – we must present solutions, too.

They have also stated that they would like to hear solutions. We’ve received many e-mails and other bits of feedback asking that we point to the places that are doing FOI well. Here are two “solutions stories” we ran in July:

You can read the rest of our Secret Canada coverage by visiting The Globe’s landing page for the project.

From the reporter’s notebook

In our last newsletter, I said we were preparing to submit a new batch of requests. By the time you receive this newsletter, we will have – hopefully! – filed upwards of 400 FOI requests. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the process.

First, we had to figure out which institutions we’d be filing requests to. The basic version of this is easy enough: We’re filing to all the same public institutions as last year. We also decided to expand the database’s scope, so we’ve filed requests to dozens of public institutions we weren’t previously tracking. We learned last year that provincial ministry names and responsibilities change frequently – so we had to go back and rebuild our list of ministries from scratch.

After we had a list, we tightened the request letter. (This year’s is three pages long.) We had to break our office printer two times to get the 600+ pages we needed to send out.

View this image in the gallery

Aware that FOI offices might come back with similar questions, our Secret Canada team spent time writing a response guide for FOI office staff.

We’re filing requests through a combination of physical letters, e-mails and online portals, and using a massive Google Docs spreadsheet to track it all. Robyn has 51 requests to submit and I still have 161 to complete (someone please help), mainly because I ran out cheques and had wait for my bank to send more. (Ah, Canadian FOI…)

Manila envelope

I asked in our previous newsletter: Have you tried to access public documents, through an FOI request or another means? What did you request, and how was that experience?

Here’s James McKinney, who once filed an FOI asking for geographical data files from an Ontario city:

My most ridiculous case had to do with requesting Whitby’s ward boundaries as a GIS file. The case had to be mediated. I was successful, as the mediator explained that “we don’t know what he’s going to do with the files” is not an exemption under the act.

I hope everyone’s enjoying these final weeks of summer. Robyn and myself will both be taking a well-deserved break in this month. See you soon.

Tom

P.S. 800-ish words. It’s not bad!