ATIP to Finance: revoking charitable status to Pregnancy Care Centres Part 5

Here is my review of the first half of my recent ATIP to Finance. 

I wrote about the second half, here, here, here and here.

This first half contains many references to US statues and US information discussing ways to go after Crisis Pregnancy Centres. It appears that the government was looking for something they could hang their coat on, to justify allegations of misinformation coming from pregnancy care centres. I guess they knew that there was nothing in Canada that helped their case. And any comments made on these statutes were redacted.

And of course, there were more letters from Joyce Arthur. Arthur writes a lot of letters to the government. They were included. 

I've counted the number of exclusions it contains. There are 270 of them.

Section 20 12 times

Section 19 14 times

s.17 62 times

s.19 10 times

Section 69 86 times

s.69 27 times

Section 23 10 times

s.16 49 times

So here's the thing. Why don't we just get rid of the Access to Information Act altogether? I am dead serious. Anything of substance in my request is redacted or withheld. So why do we keep pretending that the Act is working? It is not.

This ATIP took 19 months for me to get information back. Clearly a lot of bureaucrats spent a lot of time reading documents, and making sure nothing of substance was revealed. What a waste of time for bureaucrats. What a waste of time and money, especially for tax payers.

Or, we could make access to information real and allow information to be disclosed. As in, stop redacting and excluding information that the client is looking for. Stop pretending that the Access to information is a real thing. It is not.