We saw this tweet, briefly checked it, found out this is a widespread problem with Canada's Freedom of Information, decided to create this platform planck.
For a deeper look into examples of the problem, the scale of the issue and why it even exists, we highly recommend this deep dive by The Globe and Mail called 'Secret Canada' here.
Our proposed solutions are:
Reduce the price of online record searches to a symbolic value
Automate the online record searching process
Enforce timeframe expectations for non-autmoated processes
Weaken the ability of departments to reject/stall legal requests
Any fees must not be based on the number of records in the result
Speed up the addition of documents to the Freedom of Information infrastructure
Why?
Online databases are fast and cheap these days. When built and maintained well they can handle large amounts of requests efficiently and quickly. We will require a symbolic cost exclusively as a measure to counter spamming and similar issues.
Deparments being able to reject/stall requests that are otherwise legal/non-sensitive is ridiculous.
We will refine and expand on the above as we research more.