Justice Minister Andrew Parsons says there was turnover in staff in the main Access to Information and Privacy Protection (ATIPP) office last year and turnover in some access co-ordinator positions in the various government departments and agencies, but it is not necessarily a sign of staff burnout.
In an interview Wednesday, Parsons told The Telegram that members of the public service can change jobs for a variety of reasons, including as a result of a promotion or a new employment opportunity, and changes need close review.
“To say that turnover equates to burnout, you just can’t make that correlation,” he said.
At the same time, Parsons acknowledged a rising number of information requests being faced by staff responsible for access to information year over year — reaching more than 2,000 requests in 2017.
Parsons said the province’s access to information and privacy protection system continues to perform well despite the challenges.
The main ATIPP office is the heart of the system, supporting all access to information co-ordinators in government departments and agencies. The office determines training, reviews completed responses before they are released publicly (to help protect against unlawful privacy breaches), helps guide multi-department requests and offers support to all of the department and agency-based information co-ordinators, providing an extra set of hands as required.
This year, the main office completed about 65 training sessions around the province, took over 1,600 phone calls for guidance on information requests, reviewed over 80 cabinet papers prior to public release and completed 70 “preliminary privacy impact assessments” for improving a variety of government programs and services, Parsons said.
The ATIPP office is budgeted under the Department of Justice and Public Safety.
While essential to the system, the office had a salary budget of $679,600 last year and spent only $379,600. In a House of Assembly committee meeting, it was explained the office was actually down three staff in 2017-18. Some new staff has been hired to fill vacant positions, and the salary budget is back up over $660,000 for the current fiscal year.
Looking ahead, Parsons said he is not interested in going down the road of reducing the overall number of requests for information being put to the government by the public and government members through some change in legislation (for example adding a fee on requests, or extending the legislated response times).
“It’s not somewhere where I am right now,” he said, adding that his current focus is on internal practices, considering anything in the day-to-day work that could help the response process.
Outside of the main ATIPP office, each department and agency of the government has its own co-ordinator responsible for responding to access to information and privacy requests.
Information and privacy commissioner Donovan Molloy recently reviewed a case involving a delayed response to an information request put to the Department of Transportation and Works in late 2017. In his decision, Molloy noted the department did not meet the legislated deadline for a response to a request, and his office understood the department would also fail to meet deadlines on two other requests.
The delay was said to be the result of the size of the request, the number of requests being processed at the time and a change in access to information co-ordinators.
“The deadlines in the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act 2015 are not suggestions satisfied by best efforts. The deadlines are mandatory legal requirements that the department failed to meet in this case,” the commissioner stated.
Molloy flagged “frequent turnover of co-ordinators,” and said the department was not unique in its challenges and recommended additional staff be assigned to handling requests. He also noted staff had indicated steps were being taken to streamline the standard response process to avoid any further violations.
