2012-2013 Transport Canada

Transport Canada (TC) is responsible for transportation policies and programs. It ensures that air, marine, road and rail transportation are safe, secure, efficient and environmentally responsible. Transport Canada works with other government departments and jurisdictions, and with industry to ensure that all parts of Canada’s transportation system work well.

In 2012-13, TC received 2,197 new requests within the reporting period, an increase of 272% as compared with 2011-12 (591 requests). TC was the fourth-ranked institution in terms of requests received under the ATIA in 2012-13, representing about 4% of all requests received in 2012-13. The increase of 272% in requests received appeared to have been challenging for TC, as it performed below the results achieved government-wide in 2012-13.^{Footnote 1}

TC completed about 56.7% of all requests in its inventory in 2012-13, compared to a completion rate of 67.3% achieved in 2011-12. The average number of days to complete a request in 2012-13 was 119 days.

The most common sources of requests received in 2012-13 included members of the media (43.2%), the public (29%) and the private sector (22.5%).

Table 1: Workload

Overall, the volume of pages processed required to complete a request was considerably lowered. Most of the requests required the processing of 100 pages or less (81%), and an average of 104 pages were processed per request (a decrease of 44 pages/request compared to 2011-12). The proportion of pages reviewed that were disclosed went up in 2012-13, from 68% in 2011-12 to 86% in 2012-13.

Timeliness

TC responded to 488 requests within 30 days or less, which represents about 34.4% of the requests completed in 2012-13. This proportion was 64.8% government-wide. A fair amount of requests closed during the reporting period also took more than 365 days to complete (160; 11%).

However, Transport Canada significantly improved its performance with regard to late requests: about 21% of the requests completed were closed past the statutory deadline^{Footnote 2}, compared to 51% in 2011-12. This proportion achieved in 2012-13 represents an “F” grade^{Footnote 3} . 

TC invoked workload as the principal reason why requests were closed late in 2012-13 (83% of the time).

Extensions

TC took 861 extensions to close the 1,419 requests completed in 2012-13. In comparison, a total of 297 extensions were taken to close 635 requests in 2011-12.

The extensions taken were generally for longer periods of time. The proportion of extensions for 30 days or less went down from 14.1% in 2011-12 to 7.3% in 2012-13.

More than half (61%) of the extensions in 2012-13 were also taken under section 9(1)(a).

Disclosure

Of the 1,419 requests completed, about 11% of them were disclosed entirely. This proportion was 25% in 2011-12. This is lower than the proportion government-wide (21.6%).

Table 2: Performance

Complaints

The number of complaints received by the OIC against Transport Canada went up from 30 complaints in 2011-12 to 72 in 2012-13.

The number of administrative complaints also increased from 14 in 2011-12 to 31 in 2012-13. However, in terms of proportion of all complaints received each year, administrative complaints represented 43.1% in 2012-13, compared to 46.7% in 2011-12.

About 63.8% (46) of the complaints received in 2012-13 were considered well-founded. The remaining complaints were discontinued (15), not well-founded (3) or still pending (8).^{Footnote 4}