On top of the retention policy, what I'm worried about—actually I issued a letter this week to the institutions—is that they have to be aware that when an access request comes in, all records have to be processed, treated and retrieved, including transitory documents and messages. If they don't have a system in place to stop the deletion or the automatic deletion, we may end up losing some of those documents that are responsive to an access request.
The Access to Information Act does not differentiate between the types of messages and the types of records, but I understand that for proper information management, it is okay to get rid of transitory messages and transitory documents as long as the decisions, the discussions and minutes.... There's a proper way to capture those decisions, so that ultimately they could be retrievable and accessible.