I think there are a number of layers to that. For me the law and the culture interact very seamlessly.
If the law allows you to set a long time limit for responding to a request without essentially any accountability—and Mr. Drapeau has described quite well how that works, because if you want to appeal it is going to take you even longer—then you're basically telling civil servants, “If you're okay giving it out...but if you don't want to give it out, stick a long delay on it.” If the law is full of broadly worded, malleable exceptions that pretty much allow you to make an argument that anything could be secret, you're telling civil servants, “This is not that serious. We want to give you lots of grounds to protect anything you don't want to give out.” That is basically how the culture around this issue has developed in Canada.
We work internationally, and I've seen in lots of other countries, especially developing countries, which are often coming from periods of really harmful secrecy, countries like Bulgaria, like Mexico, like India, where civil servants have kind of lorded it over the public, and now they have this tool, and from the civil society side as well as from the citizens' side, they don't accept that kind of culture and their laws are not designed to allow it to build.
I think in Canada we have now fallen into an attitude of apathy on the part of the public, because it is a huge hassle to make a request, and it will take you so long and whatever, and you may not get the information, so why really bother? But definitely within the civil service there is an attitude that this is not that serious, that there's no accountability and there are no sanctions. There are sanctions in the law, but they have never been applied—never once in the whole history of this law.
So there is a cocktail of things. I think the lack of clear and binding powers on the part of the Information Commissioner is another important part of that. If the Information Commissioner could force public bodies and make statements that this is completely outside of the law, that they have to do this.... There is a whole bunch of ingredients to it. But to us, and we have studied systems around the world, we really need to start with reforming the law. It is going to take time to change the culture within public bodies, because as you said, cultures are difficult to change, and not sort of snap-change things.
It's not that quick to change the law, but it's quicker than changing culture. We feel that's needed to push the cultural change.