Provincial government sitting on upward of 5,000 unpublished access-to-information requests

The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador is sitting on upward of 5,000 completed access-to-information requests that are eligible for public posting but remain unavailable to journalists and the public.

“Since the completed access to information request webpage launched in 2013, more than 17,000 general requests have been received and responded to by departments. Of those, more than 12,000 requests have been posted on the completed access to information requests webpage,” an unnamed staff member from the province’s Access to Information and Protection of Privacy (ATIPP) Office wrote in an April 21 email to The Independent.

The volume of unpublished access-to-information requests is coming into focus following an Independent story earlier this month which revealed more than 1,000 completed FOI requests from 2024-2025 alone remained unpublished on the government’s website.

While the province isn’t legally obliged to publish all completed freedom-of-information requests, it is government policy to publish eligible requests 72 hours after a response is provided to an FOI applicant by email, or five business days after a response has been sent by regular mail. To be eligible for public posting, a request must be categorized as “general,” typically meaning it’s not a request for a person’s own private information.

In recent years Newfoundland and Labrador’s ATIPP Office has faced a growing number of access requests but has failed to bolster its staffing and resources to meet the demand. It’s unclear to what extent the unpublished responses are contributing to the number of requests in recent years; if a published response already answers questions that a journalist or other member of the public might have about an issue, they would not have to submit a subsequent request.

Last week The Independent asked the ATIPP office for a list of completed access-to-information requests, and the wording of those requests, which have not yet been made publicly available on the government’s website. Compiling that information, the unnamed person from the office said, “would take substantial time – potentially as long as two weeks.” Instead of compiling that list, the office is “focusing [its] resources on continuing to review and publish eligible completed access to information requests on the completed access to information requests webpage.”

Since The Independent’s inquiry about the backlog in March, the office says it has posted more than 380 further completed requests, “bringing the total to over 71 per cent of eligible completed responses now publicly available.”