Well, when it comes to the cabinet confidences, in British Columbia they are 15-year confidences. They're not 20 years, the way they are federally. That permits us to look at records that cabinet would have deliberated on or decided upon earlier; we can go back 15 years.
One of the central problems is that outside of that Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa window, the law isn't used all that much out here. My counterparts out here barely use the federal law. We use provincial and municipal laws here in order to gain access to information. I think that should tell us something, that there is generally a belief that the law doesn't work and so it's not worth trying.
It used to be that I could walk into someone's office and talk about the requests I had with them, and deal with them locally on something. Now, of course, that's an impossibility being three time zones away. I think other researchers out here just shrug and don't use the law.