In reply to questions from Senator Don Plett, the leader of the opposition in the Senate, Libraries and Archives Canada disclosed it had 14,936 unopened boxes containing private archives and 2,949 boxes of government archives.
Boxes of private papers given to the archives by prominent Canadians in 1971, to be stored for posterity, have yet to be opened, along with government papers received in 1973.
And of course until the boxes are opened, it's impossible even to know what you cannot access.
I have some skin in this game. In 2018 Library and Archives Canada accepted a deposit of my own documentary archive, such as it is. But since I have not yet completed the deposit of digital materials to go along with the tangible paper one, there has been no movement in the accession process, mea culpa. Anyone who would want access to the Moore papers may be well advised not to have been born yet.
On the other hand, the news is not all bad, or even as bad as it used to be:
Since a report in 2014 by the Auditor General highlighting the backlog at Library and Archives Canada, the number of unopened boxes containing government archives has been reduced from 98,000 to almost 3,000.
(Hat-tip to Allan Levine, who pointed me to the story in the Globe & Mail.)
