The Collection Storage Facility, a Library and Archives Canada building in the east end of Gatineau, Que., in November, 2022.Ashley Fraser/Globe and Mail
Library and Archives Canada is planning deep cuts to its access to information division that will put at risk its ability to comply with access and privacy laws, the department has acknowledged in a document.
The archives, or LAC, is the central storing house for historical records from across the federal government and is widely used by researchers and journalists. Records in its possession include previously classified files such as summaries of cabinet meeting debates or reports compiled by Canada’s intelligence officials.
The planned cuts threaten to worsen what is already a system in distress.
An in-depth Globe and Mail project called Secret Canada included a report based on interviews with dozens of historians, researchers, archivists and academics who regularly deal with LAC. They said the inability to access historical records from the archives had become so dire that Canadian historians now often rely on the public archives of other countries to do research.
The Secret Canada investigation documented wide-ranging problems across many public institutions countrywide when it comes to providing legally required access to government documents.
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Last year, federal departments were asked to develop options for finding internal savings as part of a plan announced in the November budget to reduce internal spending by $60-billion over five years.
While many departments have started to announce targets for reducing overall staffing levels, few details have emerged so far as to what specific programs or services may be cut.
A February document viewed by The Globe shows that LAC plans to save about $13.6-million a year once fully implemented in three years by reducing the size of its access and privacy team.
“The Access to Information and Privacy and pro-active access functions will be gradually reduced over 3 years, which may impact the ability to fully comply with legislated requirements under the Access to Information and Privacy Acts,” the document states.
The document says this would involve the elimination of 96 full-time-equivalent (FTE) positions.
When asked about the document, LAC spokesperson Richard Provencher said the planned reduction figure has since been revised slightly to 87 full-time equivalents over three years.
“LAC is committed to meeting its obligations under the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and will continue to take appropriate measures,” he said in an e-mail that pointed to the department’s series of reports documenting its progress at improving the system after a highly critical investigative report in 2022 by Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard.
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The change would be a 32-per-cent reduction in staff working on access- and privacy-related files over three years, in addition to a cut of 23 FTEs that occurred over the past fiscal year.
An FTE measures the extent to which an employee represents a full-time budget expense. It is one of two main ways that Ottawa counts public servants. The other is head count, which can include part-time workers.
Canadians can obtain government records from individual departments through the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) system, typically for a $5 fee.
Prior to 1983, Canada operated on a rule under which departments transferred their records to the archives after 30 years. That timeline was not included in the 1983 law that created the ATIP system, leaving a patchwork approach to how departments hand over historical records to the archives.
Even when records have been transferred, a formal ATIP request to the archives is often required to obtain the documents.
The House of Commons committee on access to information, privacy and ethics recommended in a 2023 report that records should be automatically released after 25 years, but the government did not accept that recommendation in its response to the committee.
On Thursday, Treasury Board president Shafqat Ali announced public consultations related to a review of the Access to Information Act, which the government is required to do every five years according to a 2019 update to the law.
Canadian historian Adam Chapnick, a professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada who has written several books on Canadian history based on records obtained through the archives, expressed concern at the department’s planned cuts.
“I don’t know how you justify this decision if you have any sort of commitment to history,” he told The Globe in an interview.
Prof. Chapnick said Canada is an international outlier in its heavy reliance on formal requests through the access to information system as the vehicle for releasing records. He said federal policies should allow for far more pro-active or automatic disclosure of historical records after a certain amount of time.
“To be honest, I’ve rearranged my research program to be less reliant on Library and Archives Canada, because over the last decade and a half, it has become increasingly difficult to do serious scholarship that involves Canadian archival material in a timely manner, particularly when you don’t live in Ottawa,” he said.
The department is planning to move into a new landmark facility that is set to cost $334-million. Called Ādisōke, the archives will share the five-storey building with the City of Ottawa public library.
The City of Ottawa announced in December that the building will not open in 2026 as previously planned.
The document outlining the planned cuts was provided to the House of Commons government operations committee, which is holding hearings into the government’s broader spending-review plans.
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Conservative MP Kelly McCauley, who chairs the committee, said the cuts will make a broken access to information system even worse.
“I’m stunned and gobsmacked that they would put in writing that there’s an intention to violate access to information laws in order to make the expenditure-review cuts,” he said in an interview.
The Information Commissioner of Canada released a special systemic investigation of Library and Archives Canada in 2022.
That report found that almost 80 per cent of requests completed by LAC did not comply with the time frames set out in the Access to Information Act.
The commissioner expressed concern in her report about the “somewhat alarming picture” that resulted from the investigation. She said that while the government pledged to implement most of her recommendations, “I remain disappointed by an apparent lack of engagement to make concrete and positive improvements.”
The report said part of the reason for delays is the lack of a clear regime for declassifying sensitive documents related to historical national-security and intelligence-related records.
In a December report, LAC said it has implemented significant changes over the past two years that will lead to “long-term improvements” related to transparency.
It also said a “Declassifying Team” is working to make more records available without an ATIP request as a way of reducing the overall burden on the system.
The report said the team analyzed 414,535 pages of classified documents and pro-actively declassified 111,953 pages, which LAC said was more than double the previous year’s volume.
The department also recently announced that as of Dec. 15, 2025, it is waiving all application fees associated with ATIP requests.