Freeom from Information: going "meta" edition (II)

John R. Cummings pays a lot of lip service to words like "transparency" and "accountability", and even lights up the ongoing issue of access to electronic documents, while at the same time buying into the Williams Provincial Government's deliberately luddite policy of making electronic records as utterly useless as possible.

Without any further discussion of this important point to shed light on his secret reasoning, Mr. Cummings says:

It is recommended that public bodies should provide information to applicants in electronic form when requested, provided it is reasonable to do so and security measures have been taken to ensure the integrity of the document will remain.

This is Williams Provincial Government code for copy protection or non-textual scanning of records to make sure that the information contained therein cannot easily be copied, shared with others, or analyzed.

The perverse result of this, of course, is that by forcing users of government publications to manually transcribe data which could have been provided in useful electronic formats, but deliberately was not, the "integrity" of the document stands a much greater change of being grossly violated by simple human transcription errors.

Exhibit A: the Review of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, John R. Cummings, Q.C., Review Commissioner, dated January 2011... which you are not permitted to copy: