Marleau said the decision by Canada's Foreign Affairs Department to systematically prevent the release of hundreds of thousands of government records, as first reported by Canwest News Service on Monday, is a symptom of a much broader problem, where bureaucrats are trying to use every administrative trick in the book to avoid a mounting workload.... Canwest News Service reported Monday that, since January 2008, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) has prevented the release of more than 160,000 pages of government records on everything from the mission in Afghanistan to new free-trade deals to the NATO briefing materials Maxime Bernier left at his girlfriend's home .