Thirty-seven federal institutions, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Transport Canada and Employment and Social Development Canada, had posted no record at all of their completed access to information requests for July 2026 as of the Sept. 20 refresh of the federal Open Government Portal, a comparison of two government registers shows.
Under Appendix D of the Treasury Board Directive on Access to Information Requests, in force since July 13, 2022, every institution subject to the Access to Information Act must publish summaries of its completed requests within 30 calendar days of the end of each month, and must file a separate “nothing to report” entry in any month it has no summaries to publish. The portal itself states the 30 day rule in the description of the dataset. The deadline for July 2026 passed on Aug. 30.
The completed request summaries dataset held 203,688 rows when it was refreshed on Sept. 20, and its companion nothing to report dataset held 6,253. Cross-referencing the two shows 167 institutions filed at least once in 2026. Only 130 of them had any July 2026 entry. The gap widens further back: 142 institutions filed for June 2026, a deadline that passed on July 30, leaving 25 institutions nearly two months overdue on that month alone.
Several of the absent institutions are among the busiest in the system. Transport Canada logged 482 completed requests in the register for 2025, Employment and Social Development Canada 394, Indigenous Services Canada 330, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada 243 and CSIS 141. The most recent month for which Transport Canada has filed anything is February 2026. For Indigenous Services Canada, Crown-Indigenous Relations and the Canada Council for the Arts, it is January 2026. Communications Security Establishment Canada, Shared Services Canada, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, VIA Rail Canada and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority also had no July filing.
The pattern is not new. Counting only strict interior gaps, months in which an institution filed both before and after but nothing in between, the two registers show 217 missing institution-months across 80 of 191 institutions between August 2022, the first full month under the directive, and July 2026. Counting every month from an institution’s first filing in that window through July 2026, the total rises to 642 missing institution-months across 112 institutions.
The registers also contradict each other. In 117 institution-months, a body filed a “nothing to report” declaration for a month in which it simultaneously published completed request summaries. The largest single case is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which filed a nothing to report entry for January 2020 while the summaries dataset lists 57 completed requests closed by the force that same month. Both figures were confirmed directly against the portal’s query interface. The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation accounts for 13 such contradictory months, the Office of the Correctional Investigator 12 and the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board nine.
Fourteen records carry dates that have not yet arrived, even though the portal’s published data schema states the year field “must not be in the future.” Twelve are dated December 2026, eight of them filed by Employment and Social Development Canada. The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada has filed a nothing to report entry for November 2026.
Individual entries strain credibility too. The Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board lists request 2021-001, closed in January 2021, at 5,000,000 pages with a disposition of “all excluded,” a combination the schema does not allow, since the pages field counts pages released and an all excluded file releases none. Across the register, 80 requests marked “no records exist” report pages released above zero, and 330 marked “all disclosed” report zero pages.
The Treasury Board Secretariat is both the custodian of the datasets and the owner of the directive that sets the deadline. The portal’s own description concedes that not all federal institutions post their summaries, and names no consequence for those that do not.
