Canadian Freedom of Information Personnel: Views and Lessons Learned
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Though there is ample literature on freedom of information law, there is little information that considers the work of freedom of information [FOI] or access to information [ATI] coordinators and the challenges they face. It is even more concerning that no research of this kind has been done in Canada given federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal government commitments to FOI and ATI. Our research seeks to fill this gap. We interviewed nine FOI and ATI government personnel in Canada to explore the complexities of working in this field. We examine their responses to questions about the challenges in their work; the barriers that they encounter; their background and training; their goals; and their views on transparency and public administration. By interviewing those on the “front lines of records requests,” we not only gain insights into the realities of their work, but we also learn how FOI legislation and policies can be improved. These insights are particularly relevant in Manitoba, where the former Progressive Conservative government made many efforts to undermine the principles of FOI. These efforts include a refusal to respond to the Manitoba Ombudsman’s concerns and recommendations, which are, in part, informed by FOI personnel.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".