Library and Archives Canada has a new statement on intellectual freedom. It commits to making collections “available to all,” to not restricting access based on “a user’s intentions,” and to standing in “opposition to censorship.” Those are strong words. Earlier this year, I put them to a practical test.
In April, I filed an Access to Information request with LAC seeking “documentation on internal or collaborative projects finalized, in development, or under preliminary consideration intended to increase or update online access to LAC holdings for fiscal year 2026–27 and beyond.” In plain terms: what is LAC planning to digitize or make more accessible online, and when?
LAC’s response was a notice of extension: 450 days.
What the Access to Information Act actually allows
To be fair to LAC, the extension is entirely legal. The Access to Information Act permits institutions to extend the 30-day response deadline where a request involves a large volume of records or requires consultations that cannot reasonably be completed within the standard period. LAC is not, on its face, violating the law by invoking this provision.
But legal compliance and alignment with stated institutional values are different questions.
The alignment problem
LAC’s intellectual freedom statement is framed around access. Its own language commits the institution to “making our collections available to all” and “creating space for the exchange of ideas.” It explicitly states that LAC does not restrict access based on a user’s intentions.
The information I requested is not about the collections themselves. It concerns LAC’s own plans, its internal and collaborative roadmap for expanding public access. This is operational information about how a publicly funded institution intends to fulfil its mandate.
“An institution that opposes censorship might reasonably be held to a higher standard of openness about its own plans than the minimum the law requires.”
A 450-day extension on a request of this kind creates an obvious tension. If LAC has concrete plans to improve online access, those plans will be either substantially underway or shelved before any researcher, partner, or interested member of the public can learn what they were. The information, when it eventually arrives, may describe a past rather than inform a future.
The institutional transparency gap
LAC’s intellectual freedom statement is entirely outward-facing. It describes what LAC does for users regarding its holdings. It says nothing about transparency regarding LAC’s own decision-making, planning, or partnerships. That gap is not unusual for a government institution, but it is worth naming, precisely because LAC places intellectual freedom at the centre of its public identity.
Intellectual freedom, as a principle, is not limited to library collections. It includes the right to seek information about public institutions and their intentions. A 450-day response window on questions about publicly funded digitization plans does not obviously serve that principle, whatever its legal standing.
What’s fair to acknowledge
LAC manages an enormous volume of records and operates under real resource constraints. ATIP requests compete with ongoing operations, and large-scale searches through internal project documentation are genuinely time-consuming. The volume of responsive records is likely substantial.
LAC’s intellectual freedom statement acknowledges its legal obligations, including those under the Access to Information Act. Institutional transparency and collection access are treated, in that document, as related but distinct commitments.
The bottom line
Practically useful to researchers? No
An institution that publicly champions intellectual freedom and access has implicitly accepted a higher standard than legal minimum compliance. A 450-day delay on a request about plans to improve public access is not censorship. But it is the kind of institutional opacity that intellectual freedom, properly understood, is meant to push back against.
I’ll report back when the records arrive. Likely sometime in 2027.
Transparency: A first draft of this post’s wording was generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 based on my comprehensive prompts.