In 1977, the then minister, the Honourable Francis Fox, tabled a green paper on access to information. Its introduction and most of the data, including the green paper itself, was drawn from the American experience. The Freedom of Information Act became a statute in the United States in the 1960s. The estimate in the green paper was that if we were to use the American experience we should anticipate 100,000 access requests a year.
Some calculations were made on the assumption that Canadians were not quite as nosy or entrepreneurial as our American cousins, and the number was reduced to 70,000. That was in 1977. This figure was used to do the original staffing of access to information staff in the various departments and institutions. So we're not even halfway to what was originally estimated as being the annual ATIP workload throughout the Canadian government.