I believe in freedom, and I believe that it should be free. To me, $5 is very reasonable, and I think Canadians are very lucky to be able to access information for no fees at all.
The problem is that because we're not very good at managing our information and because some requesters are asking for enormous numbers of documents, that has created a huge, sometimes very overwhelming, amount of paper and documents to go through for institutions.
It used to be, because you were charging, that the requester would scope down their requests because they didn't want to spend $1,000. Now we don't have that, so our institutions are telling us that they are dealing with requests that are over thousands and thousands of pages. To me, one of the key things is managing our information. If we were to clean up our email box.... Sometimes we see a request that asks for certain decisions made and there are 500 pages of an email chain going back and forth. If somebody had just kept the three or four pages that were really relevant, you wouldn't have that extra problem of dealing with this extra amount of paper.
We do have unreasonable requesters and we have unreasonable people. This is why the government has also changed the act and added a provision that if you are dealing with a request that is frivolous or made in bad faith, you can ask my authority to not respond to that request. It has not been used very much, which is great because it's an exceptional method, but if it's something that the institutions feel is completely unreasonable, is made in bad faith or is not a right use of the access act, they can use this. It has been used and it's been accepted a couple of times in the last two years.