There was a very significant increase in the total number of requests across the system during that period of time. In the last three years I think we've seen something like a 57% increase overall in the number of requests being made to the system. The complaints have gone up at the same time.
I've been asked this question many times. I have seen no specific reason for the increase. It could simply be people being more aware of their rights under the act. We've talked a lot about open government. It could be that there wasn't enough transparency. People made more access requests because of that. It's not possible to know.
What we have seen is there was an increase in requests coming from the members of the public. Members of the public are about 47% of our complainants, as well, at this time. There is a correlation with what's going on in the system and what's going on in our complaints.
I was very pleased over the first few years of my mandate to see that we were actually making a dent in the inventory. We started at 2,500 and went down to 1,700. Since then we've had a double whammy. We had a cut in resources—we have 13 fewer people than we did at that time—and an increase in volume of 30% to 40% over that same period of time.
Unfortunately, we're really where I didn't want to go when I started my mandate, but at least we know that what we were doing was working, in terms of diminishing the inventory. That's good news. Hopefully we'll be able to make some dent in that 3,000 under our current resource level if we don't experience another spike in complaints.