On November 27th, the IPC/Ontario held that a request for twelve years of electronic data on incidents involving houses used for illegal marijuana grow operations and/or clandestine labs was not a request for “records” because the required production process would “unreasonably interfere” with the operations of the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services. As it has done successfully before, MCSCS argued that the security sensitive nature of its data precluded outsourcing. In this case, MCSCS also successfully argued that its data was not structured in a manner that allowed for production without a manual review for responsiveness; at an estimated 10 minutes per record for review, the request would have taken at least 2334 hours to answer.
Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services (Re), 2013 CanLII 77834 (ON IPC).
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