Let me explain that the banking provision is in relation to the review or appeal function at our office as opposed to being at the request level. There is no banking system in terms of public bodies banking requests from applicants when they first receive an access to information request. The banking provision only applies to our office.
I think it's important to have, because our office now has the tight time frame of 65 business days to complete a complaint investigation and issue a report. If we were inundated with complaints or appeals about access to information requests from a single individual, however, we would have the ability to bank those.
That has not occurred recently. It's something that, over the 11 years that our office has been in existence, we have had issues with. We have not encountered it and have not had to use the banking provision since it came in.
In terms of a public body that might receive a lot of requests, however, the public body has the ability to come to our office and request a time extension, and one of the reasons they can present is that they've received an inordinate number of requests, whether from the same individual or not. We will look at what their capacity is, at how in-depth the request is, and we will question in detail what resources will be required to respond to the requests and may or may not grant their request for an extension.
As well, they have the ability to ask us to disregard a request, if it's overly broad. If someone comes to a public body and says, I want every record produced from this year to this year, it's something that will be unreasonable for them to respond to. It would require all of their resources and detract from their ultimate mission, whatever their organization is. The public body has the ability to come to our office and ask that we grant them the permission to disregard the requests, which we have done on a couple of occasions.