The City of Surrey has reversed course on charging a $10 application fee for information requests, after experiencing a 17 per cent drop in files while collecting nominal revenue, last year.
Surrey city council voted April 3 to eliminate the fee, with councillors Mandeep Nagra and Gordon Hepner opposed.
The fee was introduced in January 2022 by Surrey’s council run by Mayor Doug McCallum, after the provincial government amended the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) in 2021, to allow sub-provincial public and governing bodies to charge the $10 “freedom of information” (FOI) fee.
Following her successful mayoral bid in October 2022, Mayor Brenda Locke assured the public she would hold her promise in eliminating the fee. Locke told Glacier Media the reversal took time because a bylaw needed to be amended and the city has been focused on ongoing police force transition work.
A March 30 report to council showed the city raised only $1,520 from the fees, as applications dropped from 559 in 2021 to 465 in 2022. The fee was only applicable to non-personal information and was an addition to FOI fees that apply to requests that require more than three hours and deemed (by government officials) not to be matters of public interest.
The city saw a drop in information requests by private citizens, from 246 in 2021 to 180 in 2022. Likewise, media requests fell from 30 in 2021 to 13 in 2022. Journalists were forced to pay on every occasion.
“In this case, the $10 fee requirement has resulted in a significant drop of duplicate requests and requests for information made by journalists/media that, in the past, often did not result in a published media article,” states the report.
Surrey was an outlier in applying the fee and doing it so quickly after the changes to provincial law.
In January, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC), an independent government-sanctioned watchdog for privacy and information access regulations and legislation, issued a report showing of 109 public bodies surveyed, 24 charge an application fee and another 24 were considering doing so in the future.
Meanwhile, newly elected Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim promised to eliminate FOI fees altogether, however that promise has yet to be fulfilled.
The commissioner cited several concerns about the application fee.
“The fixed levy bears no relation to individual cases and risks imposing a practical barrier to the right of access to records. While the OIPC continues to urge public bodies who imposed the fee to reverse course, it is essential that those who do administer the fees do so fairly and in compliance with FIPPA,” noted the report.
The commissioner also found response times were not being applied properly and restricted methods of payment imposed additional barriers.
The commissioner also stated that the fees could jeopardize the democratic system by unfairly targeting media.
“Like political parties, media play a vital role in a free and democratic society. Their work in holding governments to account for their actions is crucial. Their utilization of the access to information regime ranks third of all applicant types.”
Media requests underwent a pronounced decline after the application fee’s imposition at the provincial government level, noted the report.
