BREAKING NEWS: RCMP goes silent to citizens using access to information laws: unprecedented in democratic accountability, says information commissioner "Canada’s national police force is violating the rights of some Canadians to access RCMP documents, according to the country’s information watchdog. Access to Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault says over the past months her office began receiving complaints from individuals saying they were not hearing back from the RCMP after filing access to information requests. “This past year at some point, they just completely stopped responding,” Legault said of the RCMP. “Requesters were complaining to my office, but we didn’t even have any response from the institution.” Legault said she has witnessed a slow corrosion of the access system, especially over the past four months. Her grim viewpoint is based primarily on the complaints her office receives and analyzes. “What I’ve seen last year was really the clear signs of deterioration across the system,” she recently told Global News. “Since the beginning of this fiscal year (April 1), there has been a 50 per cent increase in the number of complaints.” In one week this month, 80 complaints landed on Legault’s desk – a rate she says she hasn’t witnessed in the four years she’s held the post. While Legault looks to the flow of complaints as one indicator of the state of affairs for access to information, what she’s seen with the national police force is unprecedented, she said. “There’s actually an institution that’s completely stopped responding. Just stopped responding to requesters,” she said. “And this is not a small institution. It’s a big institution that gets a lot of requests and that has been performing somewhat steadily over the years.” This, she said, is failing to respect the most basic obligations of the access to information laws. Canada’s access laws give all Canadians the right to access records the government holds, subject to certain exemptions; the laws have been described as essential to democratic accountability.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 04:10:59 +0000
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