2012-2013 Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada

Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC) is responsible for meeting the Government of Canada’s obligations and commitments to First Nations, Inuit and Métis, and for fulfilling the federal government’s constitutional responsibilities in the North.

AANDC received 38% more requests in 2012-13 compared to the previous reporting period. 

Despite this increase, AANDC improved its performance compared to 2011-12, especially in terms of timeliness. It also performed better than government-wide levels.

Amongst all of the requests in its inventory (731), AANDC closed 623 in 2012-13, which is a completion rate of 85.2% (compared to 85.5% in 2011-12). The average time to complete a request was 47 days.^{Footnote 1}

59.6% of requests received by AANDC were from members of the public (similar to the year before). Requests from the media increased from 82 requests in 2011-12 to 149 in 2012-13. According to the AANDC’s annual report, journalists mostly requested records related to high-profile topics, such as the Attawapiskat First Nations and the Idle No More movement.

Table 1: Workload

In terms of volume of pages processed, 11.1% of requests required processing 1,000 pages or more, compared to 14.2% in 2011-12. 55.7% of requests required processing 100 pages or less. The average number of pages processed per request also went up by 90 pages.

Timeliness

Approximately 69% of the requests closed in 2012-13 were completed within 30 days, which is an improvement from the previous year. The percentage of requests completed in more than 120 days went down from 22.4% in 2011-2012 to 7.2% in 2012-13.

There were no requests completed past the statutory deadline in 2012-13. This represents an “A” grade.^{Footnote 2} This is a significant improvement over 2011-12, where 87 requests were closed past the statutory deadline (representing 16.8% of requests completed).^{Footnote 3}

Extensions

AANDC relied less on extensions in 2012-13 (a 26.5% decrease). However, the extensions tended to be for more than 30 days.

About half of the extensions (53%) taken in 2012-13 were under section 9(1)(b) (consultation). In comparison, a majority of the extensions taken in 2011-12 were under section 9(1)(a) (interference with operations).

Disclosure

Of the requests completed in 2012-13, 26.5% were disclosed entirely, which represents an increase compared to 2011-12. This is also higher than the government-wide disclosure rate of 21.6%.

However, AANDC disclosed 31.5% of all the pages processed (which is below the government-wide figure of 53.4%). This proportion was 5.5% higher in 2011-12.

In 16.5% of requests, AANDC responded that no records existed. In comparison, 11.8% of requests completed government-wide resulted in no records in 2012-13.

Table 2: Performance

Complaints

The number of complaints received by the OIC against AANDC decreased from 47 complaints in 2011-12 to 44 in 2012-13.

Refusal complaints accounted for 37 out of the 45 complaints received in 2012-13. The remaining were related to administrative matters (6) or Cabinet Confidences (2).

16 of these complaints are still pending (as of May 2014). Of the closed complaints, 19 were considered well-founded and 4 not well-founded. An additional 2 were considered settled and 4 were abandoned.