OTTAWA - The Harper government is challenging a report about its poor global ranking when it comes to freedom of information.
A Halifax-based human-rights group has said Canada ranks 55th in the world, behind Mongolia and Colombia, when it comes to the effectiveness of our access-to-information law.
But a memo for Treasury Board President Tony Clement says the research was flawed.
It says for one thing it did not give Canada enough credit for the proactive release of information.
The four-page memo was requested by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, but it took Treasury Board five months to release it.
Delay was one of the problems cited by the Centre for Law and Democracy in its report on Canada's ranking.
It found excessive time-extensions are too common.
The centre dismissed the government's criticisms of its report, saying even if they were true they would not change the ranking significantly.