It is a matter of culture. My feeling is that the Access to Information Act is not consistently implemented in accordance with the act's underlying principles, which necessarily dictate openness. Exemptions from disclosure must be interpreted in a limited and case-specific way. That is how the act was developed and drafted.
Is that how the act is being implemented? Having examined 10,000 or so complaints, we feel that, when a department receives an ATI request, it first tries to apply all the possible exemptions and then releases the information that remains. To date, only a small number of people complain about the information they receive. I nevertheless believe that a lot of people are not satisfied with the information they get but do not complain.
What's more, I wonder why we are even called upon to intervene in many of the cases we handle.