The individual who filed nearly 450 Access to Information requests to the CBC has revealed himself to be Michel Drapeau, a former colonel and now a lawyer in private practice.
Drapeau says he makes more than 800 requests for information each year to various public organizations. At $5 each, it costs him roughly $4,000 annually.
Since September 2007, he has submitted 448 requests to the CBC. He says he’s only had responses from 63 of the requests so far. The CBC has said that the unexpected sheer volume of requests caught it off guard and is hiring more people to try to keep up with the workload.
That’s not good enough for Drapeau. “[I've received] no answer nor any acknowledgment of delivery — anything,” he told a Quebec newspaper. “My requests have sat still. I’ve been doing this work since 1992 and I’ve never encountered this kind of situation.” In retaliation, Drapeau has filed 524 complains with the Inf
The attitude of the SRC pushed colonel Drapeau to deposit 524 complaints with the federal Information Commissioner, Robert Marleau. Marleau’s office would not comment.
As recently as this week, CBC posted a job one-year contract position for an additional person in the ATI office.
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That sucks for the CBC.
524 complaints for 450 requests?
Wow. This guys is pissed.
Two things:
1 - Is Drapeau doing this just to test our system?
If so, I respectfully don’t give a hoot.
I realize this guy is an ATIP expert, and has yielded good stories from making requests of the Ministry of National Defence, but I don’t know that 450 requests of SRC is part of an honourable goal.2- His whole "I’ve never encountered this kind of situation" comment doesn’t fly with me either, because CBC-SRC has only been doing this for about a year. Obviously, we’re not going to be exceptionally good at it yet, especially when flooded with requests from one dude.
Bear in mind that they’re probably not all really from him. It’s likely that for a good chunk of them he’s just a proxy and the requests are actually for clients who want to remain anonymous.
And, no doubt, as lawyers do he’s probably charging a pretty penny per anonymized request. Nice work if you can get it.
Is there any recourse for this sort of abuse? Sounds like he’s upping his average of 800 requests a year to "public institutions"; September 2007 is only six months ago, so he’ll be well over 900 by his "anniversary".
Want to explain a little more about "the attitude of the SRC"? Or about your use of the term "retaliation" in an aborted sentence? Those are both very leading insinuations, Tod, and you’ve left them completely open for (mis)interpreation.
When used as a title, "colonel" should be capitalized: Colonel Drapeau, please.
Here’s a brief bio of Drapeau, who was just appointed to the board of governors of RMC Saint-Jean.
It isn’t $5 per question, it’s $5 per request. CBC has not clarified its use of terminology here. You can ask as many questions as you want in one $5 written request. An experienced person would not file hundreds of unnecessarily separated requests.
Joe and Tod,
Having filed requests myself, you can ask as many questions as you want on one request. The reason you don’t just ask 100 questions on one form is that the $5 fee only covers the first 5 hours of research and prep work. After that they will start charging you for their time. So if it’s several simple similar questions it makes sense to ask them on one form, but if you have a question that you know will take some time to research it’s often better to break it down into several different requests because it will cost you less in the long run.
I know Michel well dating back to his role in helping to expose the coverup of the Somali affair, before he went to law school. From everything I know, he is an honourable man who uses Access to get information into the public domain. You can question the sheer numbers, but I don’t think it’s fair in a forum like this to question his integrity with nothing to base it on.
Dave, I think it is totally proper to question the motives of a person who files 448 requests for information and then expects the system to work when he obviously has overwhelmed it. It almost amounts to an abuse of the system. Either these requests are extremely particular in nature or he has single handedly generated a volume that is an unacceptable abuse of the system.
Remember if the volume of requests going into the CBC is enough to over run the department handling them then it stands to reason that the reverse is true. The information provided would be of such volume as to be of no real value to one individual.
No one has questioned if Michel is an honorable man, that his motives are good, or if he is even a decent person. I do believe it is fair to question his use of this particular law as possibly abusive or misguided. After all, we can all make mistakes in judgment and reason.
His law firm advertises the service I mentioned - "By having a lawyer exercise this right on your behalf, your identity is protected by the client-solicitor privilege" - so if you think that brings his integrity into question, take it up with him.
I’m not actually against such anonymizing (it could protect people from retribution by a particularly vengeful government for example - good thing we don’t have <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalk_River_Laboratories#2007_shutdown">one of those</a>), I’m just making the point that this is probably the reason for the volume of requests from a single source,the legal equivalent of a web proxy skewing your stats.
What Drapeau is doing is not an abuse of the system, all he’s doing is asking the CBC to follow the law. Parliament passed the Access to Information Act in 1984 after 20 years of attempts, mostly from mavericks like Bill Mather of the NDP and Ged Baldwin of the PCs. MPs knew that this law would create a burden on federal institutions and could prove embarrassing to those who receive public funds. In fact, that’s the whole point.
Access to Information is a right that we should all work to protect and strengthen. When Drapeau files his 5 dollar requests and asks for a response he’s not asking the CBC for a favour, he’s not asking them to go out of their way, he’s asking them to follow the law.
I don’t know how you can call it an abuse of the system if there’s no legislated limit. I honestly don’t think Michel is trying to undermine the CBC, on which he’s appeared many times over the year. Without any other information, I think a reasonable person has to give the benefit of the doubt that he’s trying to get information for himself or his clients, as is his legal right, without nefarious motives.
If his name was Linden MacIntyre and the 448 ATIs were aimed at a Crown corp. as part of an investigation, would you still be crying foul?