Individuals or institutions with something to hide, or those that simply dislike having to submit to public scrutiny, can and do find plenty of arguments and loopholes to frustrate journalists' enquiries. Several employ specialists in blocking tactics, giving them titles that suggest their job is to facilitate information flow. The snail's pace at which FOI requests are generally handled is a familiar to most investigative journalists in Canada.

The first line of defence is usually that releasing the requested information would breach privacy, even when anonymized data is requested, closely followed by claims that release would not be in the public interest, as the agency chooses to define it, sometimes going as far as to argue that journalists in general should never be given information because they might publish it.

Some institutions have similarly cherry-picked a variety of "guidelines" to bolster the discredited argument that the less said about suicide the better. At least one submission to a provincial Information and Privacy Commissioner has claimed Mindset opposes the release of suicide data to journalists, which has never been the case. That same submission held that no data should ever be given to journalists if there was the slightest theoretical chance of even one death by contagion - notwithstanding that lives could be saved by the release and scrutiny of anonymized data in the public interest. The commissioner formally rejected that interpretation, since it amounted to a block on any and all information the public might need to help it consider the agency's performance in suicide prevention, but had no final authority to compel disclosure.

Fortunately the growing number of entities adopting more open policies, on the grounds that silence has not worked, means that such stonewalling may increasingly be seen for what it is, and the steady flow of thoughtful work that takes proper account of both risks and benefits will tend to decrease the effectiveness of tactics that paint all journalism as inherently irresponsible. Mindset suggests, however, that it is time for governments that are truly concerned with mental health and suicide issues to make appropriate changes to tighten FOI legislation. As an issue of life and death, this should be above party politics.

A case in point was brought to the CASP national conference in 2019 by CBC Calgary reporter Rachel Ward, a member of the Forum's keynote panel.