Yes, in fact, the estimate I heard a few years ago was that a $5 cheque cost approximately $75 to process.
The $5 fee would act as somewhat of a deterrent, for example, for someone with insomnia in the middle of the night just flipping one request online after another and bombarding a department. If there were a $5 fee on each one of those, that would definitely act as a deterrent.
Personally, I think that, if there were a provision in the legislation to allow a department to decide whether the number of requests filed by the same individual in a 24-hour period goes beyond the duty to assist applicants, and if there were a recourse mechanism to challenge the department in those decisions, then it could certainly prove successful. Definitely, there's a trade-off here. We would need a provision to protect departments from being bombarded, but—