Access to information research in the digital era

In the four decades since Canada's Access to Information Act (1983) came into force, the massive proliferation of digital technologies has prompted significant transformations in the operations of modern governments. The impacts of this digital era on access to information (ATI) research in Canada—by which we mean both research on ATI law (and its administration) as well as research using ATI law (to generate data)—have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. In this short article, we focus on describing the pervasive digital environment that Canada's ATI system operates in and what this means for future ATI research and practice. We begin by tracing how the digitization of government has caused shifts in the administration of Canada's ATI regime before reflecting on some of the implications of these changes for the current and future state of ATI research. A core point of contention is that the future of ATI in Canada and elsewhere is productively understood through the lens of data politics—the notion that all decisions to collect, share, or use data are intractably political (Bigo et al., 2019). We conclude by proposing several research questions that can help guide future ATI research in the era of digital government.

The production and control of information is tantamount to the everyday work of governance (Pettigrew, 1972). In the era of “digital government” (Clarke et al., 2017; Lindquist, 2022), it is increasingly difficult if not impossible to think of a single governance function that is not digitized in some way. As many early proponents of “e-government” argued (Silcock, 2001), the adoption of digital technologies in the public sector can enable more effective, democratic, and participatory bureaucratic processes. At the same time, trends in digital government “challenge traditional notions of administration, management, organization, accountability, and engagement” in ways not yet fully examined and understood by academic researchers (Gil-Garcia et al., 2018: 633). The digitization of Canadian governance is reshaping the use and administration of federal ATI law in at least two ways.

First, the information that governments produce, both for purposes of internal and external communication, is increasingly “born-digital” (DeLuca, 2020: 5). Regarding ATI, this has implications for how government information is preserved, retrieved, and processed for disclosure. To reduce burdens to the ATI system, it is now more feasible to release large volumes of information through proactive disclosure. The Trudeau government's most recent Access to Information Act reform bill, which achieved royal assent in 2018, introduced into Canadian law “the principle of ‘open by default’ in the digital age by making key information available proactively, without the need to make a request” (Canada, 2019; Duncan et al., 2023). A growing digital repository of information, under the umbrella of “Open Government” (Canada, 2022), is now publicly available on the Internet.

But if digitization is expanding the amount of information accessible to citizens through proactive disclosures and by request, this is not true of all forms of information. Digitization makes it easier than ever to efficiently destroy government records. Take the Government of Canada's “Completed Access to Information Requests” portal as an example. This system, one of the most praised ATI modernization efforts enacted by the former Harper administration, allows users to informally request copies of the results of ATI requests completed by others. But only up to a point. The information that can be requested through the portal is limited to requests processed within the past two years. In most federal agencies, ATI disclosure packages older than two years can be destroyed in line with the minimum retention period recommended by Library and Archives Canada's Generic Valuation Tool (Canada, n.d.). Whereas the availability of affordable digital storage and computing power has made it feasible to collect and release more information than ever, this has not precluded policies of information control through deletion.

The increasingly digital format of government information also affects how those on the receiving end of an ATI disclosure make sense of the information they obtain and what they choose to do with it. Many ATI users have a high level of digital literacy, a competency the Government of Canada actively promotes through programming and strategic messaging (Shepherd & Henderson, 2019). Even where users lack advanced technical skills, off-the-shelf digital tools are increasingly accessible to non-technical users. One example is Google's Pinpoint tool for investigative journalists, which uses artificial intelligence to help users quickly sort and search through large collections of text. Digital tools like Pinpoint allow ATI users to handle much larger amounts of information pursuant to their request than they could in the past. This is partly reflected in official statistics: between 2015–2018, the amount of information released under federal ATI law increased by 260% (Canada, 2019). There is also the matter of how widely the information is shared once it is released. The fact that information is often released in a digital format makes it easy for those on the receiving end to share it with others using platforms like Archive.org or Dataverse.

Second, digital government is changing how—and by who—ATI disclosure is managed and controlled. Federal employees use proprietary software to track and manage information about the disclosure process (AccessPro Case Management is the most commonly used in the federal government). These private software solutions shape and mediate the disclosure process and outcome in ways deserving of future study (Stratton & Carter, 2023). In a digital-first organization, it is becoming less common for ATI officers to retrieve information from a physical archive. Instead, ATI officers—or other federal employees on their behalf—commonly identify, locate, and retrieve information by conducting broad and targeted searches from a computer. This new digital workflow is faster, cheaper, and more efficient. It is also more likely to turn up larger volumes of information with potential relevance to a request.

Government information is increasingly acquired, produced, stored, and analyzed by private contractors (Luscombe et al., 2022). Private entities, even when they enter into partnership with the Government of Canada, are exempt from the Access to Information Act, putting a great deal of information which otherwise would have been subject to disclosure laws beyond the reach of civil society. This can also work in the other direction: when private data is purchased from data brokers by the Government of Canada (Boutilier, 2022), this information enters the jurisdiction of the Access to Information Act.

ATI officers in Canada have long employed a range of informal strategies to direct, minimize, deter, block, or otherwise prevent meaningful disclosure from taking place (Larsen & Walby, 2012; Luscombe et al., 2017; Piché & Walby, 2021; Roziere & Walby, 2020). These have included using exorbitant fee estimates and lengthy estimated processing times as a deterrent, providing large quantities of information in hardcopy or digital, non-machine-readable formats (e.g., printed scans of digital spreadsheets), and simply failing to offer reasonable assistance throughout the request process. Reforms to the Access to Information Act in 2016 required federal agencies to waive all fees associated with processing an ATI request except for the initial $5 submission charge. Federal agencies were also directed to grant the requester decision-making power over the format of the final disclosure. Those filing requests under federal ATI law can now ask for the information to be provided in a digital, machine-readable format. Claims about the laborious nature of sifting through bankers' boxes in distant off-site archive facilities and other informal tactics of information control are less convincing to ATI users than they once were. This changes not only how ATI officers engage in information control, but also the kinds of “access brokering” (Larsen & Walby, 2012) tactics used by requesters to navigate and overcome the barriers that ATI officers may attempt to create.

The digitization of government and broader datafication of society have shifted how ATI is understood both by governments and their stakeholders. The norms and practices of open scholarship are frequently complementary to those of civic technologists and data activists, giving common cause to calls for more effective forms of open government to enrich both scholarship and advocacy. ATI implicates researchers in the conduct of data politics as brokering access is often a fraught process of negotiation. Even for public administration scholars who would wish to distance themselves from claims that their work is politically motivated, we contend that ATI scholarship is inseparable from the datafication of governance. Thus, even ATI research aspiring to political neutrality is embedded in the broader context of data politics. It is these transformations that we suggest require a conceptual shift toward data politics in ATI research and practice.