Open By Default: A database of access to information requests to the Canadian government · ↗ theijf.org

In Canada, any person or corporation in the country can make a request for general records to any agency of the federal government through the Access to Information Act (the equivalent in the United States is the Freedom of Information Act). The government provides a searchable database of completed requests, but includes only a summary of the request and the number of pages of responsive material. The actual documents turned over are not included. However, completed request packages may be informally re-requested, and should you do so, someone from the relevant agency will (usually) send them to you eventually.

This re-request process has its limits. It can takes weeks or months for the documents to be sent, and the database itself only goes back to January 2020 (they used to delete records older than two years, but stopped doing this some time after 2020). Occasionally, they will never send the documents at all, and all you can do is either re-request them again or open a formal access to information request (which will cost you $5).

Making it easier to access completed access to information requests is why the Investigative Journalism Foundation built Open By Default, “the biggest database of internal government documents never before made publicly accessible”. It includes documents from completed access to information requests obtained using both automated (presumably the re-request form) and manual processes (donations from trusted partners, particularly of documents from before the online re-request form was available). The files are cleaned and OCRed into one beautiful, searchable database.

Although files from access to information requests are often highly censored, there’s still a lot of really interesting information to be found for those curious enough to find it. Of course, you can find a lot of requests from cranks, too. For example, here is someone obsessively requesting proof of the existence of the SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses (links to a search in the government database, since only a handful of the requests show up in Open By Default). There’s an amusing variance in how ATIP analysts respond to vexatious requests like this: one response produced 29,348 pages whereas a similar one produced 0 pages.