It's very difficult to answer that question. As you said, the number of requests processed and the size of the files varies from one institution to another.
For example, we arranged a meeting with representatives from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to get a clear understanding of their situation. This department receives 100,000 access-to-information requests a year, but each request takes 10 to 30 minutes to process. In other words, even if little time is spent on each file, it takes a lot of analysts.
However, the Canada Revenue Agency processes files that are 10,000 pages long. It takes financial auditing experts to process these files.
Each institution has different challenges. My recommendation to the institutions would be that they look on an annual basis what the demands and difficulties were, so that they can adjust afterwards. What we're seeing is that institutions don't adjust from one year to the next.
I would also recommend the establishment of a process whereby an ad hoc group of analysts trained by the Treasury Board could assist in emergency situations. That would be ideal. It would provide a group of people who could go to work in institutions that receive more urgent requests.
At present, institutions receiving requests related to COVID-19 are certainly seeing an increase in the number of requests, but they don't have more resources to process access-to-information requests. It's as simple as that.