Over the years, a developed body of empirical academic, non-profit, and government research on freedom of information (FOI) in Canada — and elsewhere — has come to agree on the sorry state of the public’s right to know. Typically conducted through tens of public administration, this literature has effectively quantified extensive processing delays and inadequate disclosure rates, and consistently contributes to a robust understanding of the unsatisfactory products of freedom of information systems. What is less well understood are the processes that lead access regimes to reproduce the same unjust administrative secrecies they were established to remediate, which the numbers alone are unable able to speak to.
This research project by the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) aims to examine the procedures underpinning freedom of information across the approximately 60 public bodies subject to both the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and the Information Management Act, the provincial recordkeeping law in B.C.
Inclusive of the perspectives of several disciplines, including library and information studies, archival studies, political science, and sociology, and employing qualitative, quantitative, and legal research methods, the study ultimately seeks to understand how the people, policy, and devices work to open or close governments’ live archives. Access regimes are thus conceptualized as socio-technical and socio-legal systems, framed by actor-network theory and street-level bureaucracy theory, respectively. Empirically, the study draws on original data consisting of the responses of hundreds of pointed FOI requests, seeking documents as units-of-analysis that correspond to policies and procedures, records retention schedules, organizational charts, analyst job classifications, electronic documents and records management system (EDRMS) technical manuals, and more. This work will be complemented by analyses of administrative data and analytical legal research into the statutory and political-constitutional systems affecting disclosure in Canada as a Westminster parliamentary democracy.