No government that I've ever worked for has really taken record storage management or retrieval seriously. I worked as the deputy minister at the department of aboriginal affairs, and we were often called upon in litigation and other proceedings to go back to documents from the last century and the century before.
I don't know how you imagine that government record-keeping works, but it's scattered across over 300 organizations, thousands of work places, and different technical formats. Some of it is on paper, and some of it is in the software of the 1970s and 1980s. There has never been a serious investment in digitizing and catching up on historical records. They are the hardest to manage and retrieve, and they don't lend themselves to scanning for search words and keywords. There's a very expensive, labour-intensive, manual process involved in going back to anything that's more than about 20 years old.