There are quite a few things you've raised there. Maybe I'll deal with the last one first.
We have no objection to government communications functions or ministerial staff knowing what information is going to be released under the access to information so that they can be prepared with house cards and Qs and As and so forth, as long as the process of doing that does not prejudice the requester by either delaying the answer going out or by changing the amount of censoring that's in the document and so forth. That process, I think, can flow without there being any exchange of identities--and some departments do it very well.
So no, as long as timeframes are met under the statute and it is properly applied, we don't have any problem with “sensitive requests” being routed through the communications function of a department.
We do find there is an enormous amount of curiosity, and I don't know if it has to do with question period, the dynamics of question period, about the identities. When I first started in government, ministers seemed to be quite willing to say, “I don't know the answer to that, but I'll find out”. Now there's a desire to know where these questions are going to come from, and how I am going to handle them, and that involves knowing who's going to ask the question. So if there's an access requester who's a member of Parliament who is always trying to get information on the gun registry, then there will be an interest on the part of the government in knowing which MP that is, whether the question can be anticipated from that person.
And there's also a tendency to categorize in such narrow categories that even if the identity is not disclosed, there is still a possibility of prejudicial treatment of the request. So the request will go to the communications function and say, here's what is going to be released, and it is from a media requester--or it is from a member of Parliament requester. And that itself may trigger a process that delays the answer going out . Even depersonalizing will sometimes lead to prejudicial treatment if too many senior levels in the department are involved in the process.
I'm not sure if that gets at the question you were asking or not.