On January 31st a report card will be issued on the Ministry of the Environment, not on the Campbell government's ambitious climate change plans, not on protecting wild salmon, not on protection of wildlife habit and not on coal bed methane pollution, but on the Ministry's response to access to information requests. Time will tell, but there is a chance that an improvement in its response to freedom of information requests will lead to report cards on how the Campbell government is doing on substantive environmental issues.

The University of Victoria Environmental Law Clinic assisted six environmental groups with a complaint to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Commissioner. The environmentalists argued that three government ministries systematically discriminated against them. An investigation resulted in the complaint being dismissed against two of the Ministries, and a mediated resolution being agreed to with the Ministry of the Environment. Part of that resolution called for the Ministry to produce a report card on its access requests by January 31st and to arrange a meeting with the complainants by the end of February 2008 to review and discuss the results of the first report card. Production of the report card is made possible by the Ministry's adoption of the Corporate Request Tracking System (CRTS) that is used elsewhere in government to track and report on freedom of information requests.

The investigation found that the Ministry's data on access requests could not be relied on because sometimes it used a spreadsheet to track requests and sometimes it used CRTS. When the two databases and Ministry's FOI tracking forms were compared gaps were found in the data and inconsistencies were found between the different sources. The investigation produced a calculation which showed that the Ministry took an average of 74 business days to respond to requests from the eight environmental groups, compared to an overall government average of 45 business days (the law requires responses within 30 days, but extensions are permitted under certain circumstances - circumstances that appear to be routinely invoked).

According to data from the Ministry of Labour and Citizens' Services website on CRTS statistics, of 1,618 general information requests (not for personal information) throughout government in fiscal year 2006-2007, 56% resulted in full or partial disclosure (only 22% resulted in full disclosure). That's down from a full or partial disclosure rate of 62% in 1997-1998, but up from the low of only 40% in 2004-2005. Of course, regular users of FOI know that partial responses can be useless; it doesn't do much good if information is released with all key sections blanked out. By the end of February we'll see if the Ministry of the Environment becomes more transparent as it improves its adherence to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, or whether it simply becomes more adept at releasing pages with significant information blanked out.