The Globe and Mail's Gloria Galloway offers a case study of the new, streamlined access-to-information request system of the federal government.

From the July 7 Globe and Mail:

ATIP officers working in different federal departments told The Globe and Mail in 2006 that requests were routinely being held up by the Office of the Privy Council - the department that reports to the Prime Minister.

So The Globe filed a request with Public Safety Canada, a department that had been particularly slow in delivering documents, for any correspondence between Public Safety and PCO regarding the amount of time it was taking to process ATIP requests. That was in May, 2007.

Nearly a year later, on March 31, 2008, the manager of the ATIP office at Public Safety wrote back to confirm that such correspondence existed, but "the records pertaining to your request have been exempted in their entirely pursuant to section 23 of the Access to Information Act." ...

That section allows the government to withhold documents on the basis of solicitor-client privilege.

A complaint was subsequently filed with the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada, which has yet to be resolved. ...

It gets goofier, but read the full story for details.

Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who has become an advocate for the release of government information, says the fact solicitor-client privilege was used to deny the original request is ridiculous. An ATIP officer in Public Safety who may have written to PCO to complain about delays is not a lawyer, he said.

"It is indisputably bogus," Dr. Attaran said. "And in the second place, whoever that person is in Public Safety who is responsible for administering the Act shouldn't be taking instructions from PCO on what exemptions to use."

He said he gets at least one complaint about delays in the release of material every day from journalists and staff working for Members of Parliament.