Right now the act says you have to respond to an access request within 30 days, or you can ask for an extension. There are different reasons. One of them is consultations.
Consultations are not mandatory. At this point, a lot of institutions think they are or they are treating it like they are, because it's information they are sharing with another institution so they want to make sure they're not providing that information without their consultation. What we see is that often, if you have 20 pages to be consulted, they don't pinpoint what they are looking for. They don't pinpoint the recommendation they want an answer on. The poor unit that is responding to the consultation request has another pile of requests they have to go through, so they don't treat these consultation requests as a priority as well.
The consultations either have to be in the legislation.... What I propose is to put specific timelines so that after 30 days, you're out. Right now we don't have that. We have, my office was told, 90 days for a consultation on two pages.