FOI Request Related to Vaccine Mandates
A previous Dog With A Bone blog post, “Struggle for Freedom with the Town’s CAO”, went into the history of the Town of Cochrane’s imposition of a requirement for existing staff and new hires to be vaccinated. As I have mentioned before, it can be confusing when reference is made to the “Town of Cochrane”. While it may be presumed that is a reference to decisions made by our elected Town Council, often it applies to decisions made exclusively by the Town’s Administration, which appears to be the case with respect to the vaccine mandates.
To get a better understanding of what transpired with respect to the development of a policy as of September 27, 2021, requiring Town staff and new hires to show proof of vaccination, on February 25, 2022, I initiated a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, “requesting copies of all correspondence by the Town Administration, both internal within Administration and external, such as with AHS, the Mayor and Town Councillors and residents of Cochrane, related to the vaccination status of the administrative staff and the decision to require proof of vaccination for existing employees and expecting the same for new hires” for the period August 1, 2021 to the time of the FOI request.
How the Town addressed this request, which will be addressed here, was informative in of itself.
On March 1, 2022, I was at first advised by the Town’s Records Management Administrator that “Although FOIP legislation allows 30 days for public bodies to respond to requests, we will try to respond sooner than March 31, 2022”.
The next communication received from the Town’s Records Management Administrator on March 9, 2022, asked if I wished to continue with the search “Due to Mayor Genung’s email confirmation on March 2”. As explained in a previous blog post, I was advised by Mayor Genung on March 2, 2022 that, “As of yesterday, March 1st, all current or future job postings will have no reference to vaccines. Further, I can assure you that there is no requirement for proof of vaccination to be employed by the Town of Cochrane”. Despite that confirmation from Mayor Genung that the requirement for proof of vaccination to be employed by the Town of Cochrane was to be stopped as of March 1, 2022, I replied that I, nonetheless, wished the Town staff to continue carrying out the search.
The next communication I received from the Town was on March 30th advising me that “Due to the search criteria key word ‘vaccination’ this search has resulted in a large pull of records from our servers plus information submitted by staff”, and, therefore, they would be unable to meet the usual 30-day limit for a records search. I was told that an extension of 30 days was needed to allow their office to provide me with a full response and that they would try their best to get back to me sooner than April 29th, 2022. I was also told that the size of this request exceeded $150.00 of administrative time, but that they were “waiving the fees as the amount of records involved was underestimated prior to starting this search”.
The next update was received on April 29th, advising me that “progress has been delayed due to the search result size (2,945,126 KB) that we are dealing with”, that is, to my surprise, approximately 3 gigabytes (GB) of data was being plowed through to extract information related to my search request! It was further explained that their office had pulled and reviewed well over half of the records that fell into the search criteria and out of those records, about half were actually related to my search request. It was conveyed that half the search results would likely be released the following week and the remainder by mid-May.
Not receiving the first batch of the search results the following week, I made enquiries on May 9th as to the status of the search. The Records Management Administrator replied, “We have two staff working on this file and I personally worked on it every day last week. There is a lot of duplicated records due to the number of emails involved but they need to be included as they came from different email accounts”. I was informed that they were near the third party and personal information redacting phase and upon submitting the file to the Town’s FOIP Head for review and authorization, the search results would be released.
The records found relating to my FOI request were finally received from the Town on May 13, 2022, nearly a month and a half after the usual 30-day limit for a records search, and included 809 pages of information, an astonishing amount of information! I had expected the collection of information related to the vaccine mandates to be relatively straight forward matter and not such a burden for the Town’s staff.
Without considering the content of the information received, one is immediately struck by how much time and attention that the Administration obviously paid to discussions about vaccination for Covid-19 during the search period in question, nearly 3 GB of effort! Given that the average file size for an email is about 50 KB, then 3 GB would be equivalent to about 60,000 emails. That’s a lot of chatter by presumably the managerial staff of the Town’s Administration related to a preoccupation with vaccination and a vaccination mandate!
It is clear that the search effort to tease out the information of interest to me required so much effort and was so time-consuming because the Town Administration had consumed so much time and energy on this matter, which provided limited, if any benefit, to the Town of Cochrane and its citizens. During the Town’s 2022-2024 budget discussion in December 2021, the town’s Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) and other members of Administration whined about how the administrative staff was so overstretched and over-worked that they could barely keep up providing the services that Cochranites had come to expect. For example, the draft budget included a warning from the Town’s CAO, Mike Derricott, “The truth is that many of these services are at risk of degrading if we do not take immediate and decisive action to right size and properly resource our organization to match the community we serve”. And yet, they could devote so much time and energy on health matters over which they have limited or no expertise and ultimately made a decision to introduce a discriminatory policy that violated our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If they had been Charter-focused, very little time needed to have been devoted to this matter.
Part 2, “Summary of Information Gleaned from the FOI Request”, to follow.