Frivolity and vexation

Yet another bizarro moment from ODP’s bizarro scrum last week:

Well, y’know, whistleblower legislation, we want to do right. I’ll be quite frank, and I’ll be quite honest with ya, ATIP legislation, for example, has placed tremendous demands and strains on government. It takes a tremendous amount of time, I know even at my senior staff level, the amount of time that’s taken up in perusing ATIP — now, it’s a good thing, Access to Information is a very, very important thing, but there are a lot of frivolous requests that are very, very time-consuming. The one thing we don’t want to do here is just create another situation where we’re going to put a stranglehold on government.

Heaven forfend government have any limits or fetters, eh, Chairman?

The League of Professional ATIPpers, meanwhile, wondered: what on earth is that man yammering on about? why are his senior staff obsessing about ATIP requests, instead of, y’know, staffing, um, seniorly? where does he get off deciding which ATIP requests are “frivolous” and which ones aren’t? what exactly does he consider to be “frivolous” in the first pl—




Aaaaahh.

So that’s what he was driving at.