An organization advocating for journalists across Canada has bestowed a rather tongue-in-cheek award upon the Sault Ste. Marie Police Service.
On Wednesday, the Canadian Association of Journalists announced that Sault Police was selected as this year’s recipient of the Code of Silence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy, in the law enforcement category, for beefing up its service fees to access documents and records.
The Sault Ste. Marie Police Services Board approved an average fee increase of about 25 per cent in December of last year, marking the first time the fees have jumped since 2011. The rise in service fees — which saw the cost of occurrence reports jump from $50 to $63 — went into effect Jan. 1.
Requests for information under the Municipal Freedom of Information law, meanwhile, will incur a $15 fee for every 15 minutes of staff time.
“This is a transparency tax, plain and simple,” CAJ president Brent Jolly said in a release posted to the CAJ website. “This is a weaponization of fees to prevent people from gaining access to records.
“Public information should not be turned into a revenue stream by a publicly-funded body.”
The Sault’s interim police chief said that he feels the award presents a “fairly one-sided view” of why the Sault Ste. Marie Police Services Board made the decision to increase service fees amid rising labour costs.
“A large number of these requests that come in, it takes staffing hours to prepare the documents,” Brent Duguay said following a monthly meeting of the police services board held Wednesday.
“The fee increase is a reflection of what we are spending in hours from our staff to have to prepare these documents, which are ever-increasing now, it seems.”
The president of the CAJ, however, isn’t buying that.
“The math just doesn’t add up,” Jolly stated in the release. “The public is paying a dollar a minute for staff time to access information, but the staff accessing those records are paid less than a dollar per minute.”
Duguay was quick to refute Jolly’s remarks.
“I don’t think we’re in a money-making process — I think we’re charging against the time our staff spent doing the work that’s being requested of them to do,” said the interim police chief.
“We are not refusing to provide the document, we just want to be compensated for the time and effort spent.”
The entire list of service fees can be found on the Sault Police website.
Presented annually by the CAJ, the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, the Code of Silence Awards are intended to call attention to government or publicly-funded agencies that “work hard to hide information to which the public has a right to under access to information legislation,” according to the CAJ's website.