A complaint was made for fewer than 3% of access to information requests. That is not a very large number. The table that I provided is designed to demonstrate that, when I was appointed commissioner in 2018, there was a backlog of 3,489 cases. I was just taking up the job and there were already 3,400 complaints and investigations pending.
On April 1, 2019, after a year of work, we had lowered this figure to 3,300, but the grey shaded area in the table shows what remained from my initial backlog, whereas the pink section represents new complaints. Then, in 2020, we further reduced the number of older cases. We are continuing to work on the cases from the previous year, but, then, we received 5,900 new complaints this year and we still have 2,400 to deal with.
I checked this morning and found that we had processed 5,200 complaints this year. That is unheard of. Last year, we processed 2,600 and the year before that we handled 2,400. We generally deal with most of our complaints informally, but we will never be able to manage the demand with the resources we currently have.