The federal government spent $3,246 processing the average access to information request last year at every institution except one, and $67 per request at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, a gap that has widened in each of the last three years and that is invisible in the headline numbers Ottawa reports.
The figures come from three separate federal registers that have to be read together. The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat’s Access to Information and Privacy Statistical Report for 2024-25, published Dec. 16, 2025, reports that institutions closed 36,361 access requests at a total program cost of $118,022,916, and states explicitly that IRCC’s data are excluded because the department’s volumes differ so sharply from the rest of the system. The Office of the Information Commissioner’s report on the state of the access to information system, which does include IRCC, puts government-wide spending at $130,070,705. IRCC’s own annual report to Parliament reports that its access to information program cost $12,047,789 and closed 178,668 requests. The three figures reconcile to the dollar: $118,022,916 plus $12,047,789 is $130,070,705.
Divided out, that is $67.43 per request at IRCC and $3,245.86 per request everywhere else, a ratio of 48 to one. The same calculation applied to earlier years, using the same pair of reports, gives $61.72 against $1,981.02 in 2022-23, a ratio of 32 to one, and $65.69 against $2,442.68 in 2023-24, a ratio of 37 to one. The gap has widened every year.
The staffing figures move the same way. IRCC reports 143.401 person-years dedicated to access to information activities. The Information Commissioner’s report puts the government-wide total at 1,284 person-years, leaving roughly 1,141 for every other institution combined. That works out to about 1,246 requests closed per person-year at IRCC and about 32 everywhere else. IRCC’s report notes that roughly 550 departmental liaison officers also support the program but are funded through their own program areas, meaning part of the department’s real cost sits outside the figure it reports.
Averaging the two populations together also produces the appearance of improvement where there is none. The Information Commissioner reports that 78.04 per cent of access requests were closed within legislated timelines in 2024-25, up from 32.91 per cent in 2022-23. Treasury Board, which excludes IRCC, reports 64.5 per cent for 2024-25, down from 72.3 per cent in 2022-23 and the lowest figure in the ten years it publishes, below even the 65.1 per cent recorded in the first pandemic year. Subtracting the non-IRCC series from the government-wide series shows IRCC’s own compliance rate ran at 21.1 per cent in 2022-23 and 77.0 per cent in 2023-24. IRCC’s annual report confirms those figures, citing 77 per cent for 2023-24 and 80.7 per cent for 2024-25. The entire jump in Canada’s headline compliance rate is one department’s one-year swing.
IRCC’s own tables raise a further question. The department reports closing 21,406 requests, 12 per cent of its total, in more than 365 days, while reporting that it claimed extensions under section 9 of the Access to Information Act 1,110 times over the year. It also reports 17,022 requests, roughly 10 per cent of the total, closed as abandoned.
The registers do not fully agree with one another. Treasury Board’s Table 3 reports 23,859 requests carried into 2025-26, but the breakdown in its own Figure 3, and the text introducing that figure, give 23,867. Only the second number reconciles with the 41,521 carried-over requests IRCC reports, producing the 65,388 government-wide backlog the Information Commissioner cites. The Commissioner’s report in turn gives two different totals for requests received in 2023-24, 229,564 in one figure and 229,764 in another, and 46,857 and 46,657 for the same year excluding IRCC.
Of the 65,388 requests carried into 2025-26, 42,578 were already past their legal deadline, 15,082 at institutions other than IRCC and 27,496 at IRCC. Requests received outside IRCC fell 27.6 per cent in a single year to 33,928, the lowest count in nine years, while pages processed rose 33.1 per cent to 13,740,293.
