Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Finance
Issue 8 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Tuesday, February 15, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on National Finance met this day at 9:31 a.m. to examine the Main Estimates laid before Parliament for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2005.
Senator Donald H. Oliver (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I see a quorum. I would like to call this 12th meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance to order. I remind you that this committee's field of interest is government spending, either directly, through the estimates, or indirectly, through bills.
[Translation]
On Wednesday, October 20, 2004, our committee was authorized to study and report on the projected expenditures of the Main Estimates for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2005.
[English]
This week, we are continuing to hear from the officers of Parliament. The Chief Electoral Officer and the Commissioner of Official Languages were before our committee last week. The Auditor General has also appeared before us. We understand that other Senate committees may hear regularly from some officers regarding their mandate and the programs they deliver. However, this committee is interested in the dollars and cents. We are here to discuss the Main Estimates and how they allocate the funds.
This morning we are pleased to have with us Mr. John Reid, the Information Commissioner. Mr. Reid was elected to the House of Commons in 1965, where he served from 1965 to 1984, through six elections. He was also parliamentary secretary to the President of the Privy Council from 1972 to 1975 and Minister of Federal-Provincial Relations from 1978 to 1979.
[Translation]
On July 1, 1998, Mr. Reid began his seven-year term as Canada's Information Commissioner.
[English]
Mr. John Reid, Information Commissioner of Canada: Honourable senators, with me this morning are Mr. Dan Dupuis, Director General of Investigations and Reviews; and Ms. Ruth McEwan, Director General of Corporate Affairs.
This is the first time in the 22 years of the existence of the Office of the Information Commissioner that we have been invited before a Senate committee to talk about our financial situation, and we are grateful for this opportunity. Perhaps now it will be no longer necessary to say of our reports, as did my predecessor, John Grace, that for all the parliamentary attention they received we might as well have put them in a rocket and sent them to Mars. We are grateful for this opportunity and hope that it is the beginning of a new interest on the part of the Senate in the operations of the Office of the Information Commissioner.
What are our immediate challenges? First, I believe there is a need to modernize and strengthen the Access to Information Act. The Minister of Justice is preparing a bill in this regard and I urge all members and senators to watch out for a wolf in sheep's clothing, because when it come to the right of access, what a government sees as reform may appear to citizens as regression. My experience in talking to my colleagues in the provinces is that no government, no matter the political affiliation, finds it comfortable being subject to legally enforced openness. I fear that any government reform bill will weaken the rights of access requesters, weaken the oversight powers of information commissioners, add new justifications for secrecy and make the access process slower and more expensive for users.
You may count on me and my officials to assist you in your deliberations on a reform bill when they begin. I have already informed Parliament of my wish list for reform in the form of a special report tabled in 2002 in response to the government's internal task force report on access reform. Copies are available on request or on my website at www.infocom.gc.ca.
I want to stay on the topic of the main subject of this meeting, which is the resources of my office. Unless my office is properly resourced I cannot ensure, on behalf of Parliament and the public, that the government will live up to its openness obligations. As it stands, our resources are entirely inadequate. Truth be told, we are in a financial crisis. In the last decade, resources have not kept pace with the workload.
With respect to the investigator group, the heart and soul of the office, the office has been unable to replace retiring or departing investigators and now has an investigator complement of 23, well below the number required to complete the forecast annual workload of received complaints. On top of this deficit there is a growing backlog of incomplete investigations that is now equivalent to a year's workload for the office. In other words, if I told my 23 investigators to do nothing but backlog investigations, it would take a year to complete, and we would not be able to touch what came in the front door.
With respect to our non-investigative group, the office has seriously depleted its capacity in the last 10 years in order to transfer resources to the investigative group. The office has moved from two assistant commissioners to one deputy commissioner, from an executive director of operations and two directors of investigations to a director general of investigations and reviews and a director of operations, and from a director of legal services and a director of litigation services to a single director of legal services.
Therefore, on the management side, we have slimmed down dramatically over the last 10 years. All resources saved have been pumped into building up the investigatory body. As well, we have had to entirely give up our public affairs, research, education and internal training capacity in order to put resources toward an increasing workload of investigations.
Despite repeated efforts to convince Treasury Board to properly fund the full range of the commissioner's mandate, including several exhaustive reviews by independent consultants jointly with the Treasury Board Secretariat, only emergency and partial funding has been forthcoming. The resource crisis was a matter of discussion with the parliamentary Committee on Government Operations and Estimates and the parliamentary Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics during the Information Commissioner's appearances last year. Some members asked whether the inadequacy of resources may be the government's way of weakening the commissioner's ability to investigate and expose cases of improper government secrecy. They also wondered if the government is using its authority to grant and withhold resources to undermine the commissioner's effectiveness and independence.
I did not then, nor do I now, consider it necessary to impute bad faith to make the point that there is a real problem of inadequate funding for the commissioner, and the result is a weakened ability to do the job Parliament has asked the Information Commissioner to do.
I want to add that this is a problem that is not necessarily unique to the Information Commissioner. I think there is a real problem with the way in which parliamentary officers are funded.
It is a difficult proposition, I believe, for the government itself to deal with this sort of hybrid organization that is, in a sense, part of the civil service and yet has no reporting responsibilities to the civil service. There has to be a considerable amount of thinking about how these offices are to be financed in the future.
No one likes to be investigated. It is difficult for the institution being investigated to provide additional funds for those investigations to go forward. I think that is a very human response.
The Chairman: We had that discussion with Sheila Fraser, who talked about a blue-ribbon committee. Minister Alcock talked about a blue-ribbon committee that might be one of the solutions to the problem. We are still waiting to hear back from Minister Alcock on that.
Mr. Reid: I will return to my little history here and then I would like to talk about that. That is an interesting concept.
In the fall of last year, I went back to Treasury Board to ask for more funds. The magnitude of increase to base funding in my office, according to the studies that we had done two and four years ago with Treasury Board, amounts to approximately $2 million, which is a 30-per-cent increase. The result was that no base increase in funding was approved, but I did get a small amount of short-term funding, approximately $400,000, which leaves us just barely able to balance the books in the coming year. It leaves us no better off in addressing our workload, nor does it leave us any better off in addressing our backlog burdens.
We need to take a new approach. The approach that I particularly like is the one taken by the House of Commons to the funding of the new Ethics Commissioner. As you know, the Ethics Commissioner now proposes a budget to the Speaker of the House of Commons. Once the Speaker is satisfied, perhaps after a review by the Board of Internal Economy, the budget will be forwarded to Treasury Board and will, without change or reduction, be included in the government spending estimates and the funding made available to the Ethics Commissioner.
It is interesting that the Information Commissioner does not have anybody on the Treasury Board to speak for him. Almost everybody else but parliamentary agents have somebody on the Treasury Board who has a responsibility to stand up for that estimate going through. The parliamentary officers have nobody.
In this case, the Speaker has the responsibility to speak up to Treasury Board for the Ethics Commissioner. If we continue to go through the Treasury Board process, we need to ensure that there is somebody to speak up for us and do the necessary negotiations. As it is, we have no ability to penetrate the inside once we have spoken to our analysts at the lower levels of the Treasury Board hierarchy.
In closing, I wish to remind honourable senators that the Access to Information Act delivers a tremendous bang for the buck. The entire system, including departmental processing mechanisms and the Information Commissioner's office, costs less than $1 per Canadian per year.
I ask the committee to make it a priority to nurture and protect this vital tool for fostering accountability in government.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Reid, for that. I know there will be many questions flowing from your opening remarks.
Is it correct that when you need more money to do your job, the only route you have is to go yourself directly to the Treasury Board?
Mr. Reid: That is correct. There is nobody else I can turn to.
The Chairman: What was the reason they agreed to give you $400,000? What was the rationale behind that?
Mr. Reid: We did not get an explanation. What we got was a phone call and a letter saying, ``This is what you are getting.''
There were originally some conditions imposed on the money. I did write to complain to the President of the Privy Council. When the final decision came out, we were given money that went into our general vote so that we will be able to use it for best purposes. I am grateful for that change.
Senator Comeau: As I was listening to your testimony, one of the things that bothered me is when you said your investigation staff did not have time for such things as research and training. In my view, that is extremely worrying. That means that these people do not have time to reflect carefully on the impact of their investigations. The lack of training means that they are not keeping up with the times.
If a particularly important case were to appear before your office and there was not enough time to reflect on the results of the investigation, those results might be posted or made public, or it could lead to improper reflection on the investigation.
Am I oversimplifying? Could that be possible, given the state of your budget?
Mr. Reid: We do provide a lot of internal mentoring. Our legal firm does give courses on decisions made by the courts. We work hard at ensuring that our manuals are continually updated. We do try to provide a significant amount of informal training and we do occasionally provide an internal course.
At one time, when I came in, for example, we had the money to pay for outside courses. We used to buy a course from the University of Windsor called ``Getting from No to Yes.'' We cannot do that any longer. We now try to do what we can with these materials ourselves because there is no way we can go outside for it.
Senator Comeau: Where I am going with this is that we live in troubled times, given what is happening throughout the world. We want to be absolutely sure that we do not provide information that might be detrimental to Canada. On the other hand, we have to be able to know what government is doing. Government cannot operate in a cloud of secrecy. Your office has taken on an even greater importance, as have those officers who try to protect people's privacy; the Privacy Commissioner on the one hand and your office on the other.
If we do not have proper funding for parliamentary officers such as you, we might be in a situation where we could aid those people who could cause problems to our state. We are not at that stage yet, are we?
Mr. Reid: We pay a significant amount of attention to that. The system that we now use is an internal one, but it uses up scarce resources to do that.
We are very conscious of the difficulties that you have outlined, and under our training program for new investigators, it takes about three years before we feel they are fully confident to fly on their own, without being closely supervised.
Senator Comeau: As your budgets dwindle and the need for funding increases —
Mr. Reid: It puts increased pressure on the system. For example, a new investigator has joined us as of yesterday. That means that he is now on a three-year program that will have to be supervised by management, and he has been assigned a number of mentors from the existing senior investigatory staff to ensure that the work he does meets our standards. It is a long process.
Our dilemma is that in the Government of Canada, there is no place from which you can hire people who are trained as investigators under the Access to Information Act. Even if we bring somebody in who has some knowledge, say somebody who works in one of the government ATIP offices, we still have to go through the entire training processes to ensure that the quality is there. Partially to ensure that quality, my director general reads all their work and supervises them all, the deputy commissioner reads all their work and I sign every letter going out of the office. That is our basic attempt at quality control.
Senator Comeau: My understanding is that there are 14 reasons for which a government can issue a secrecy order. Without going through the full list, what would be the most important of those? I can probably get the full list from the website.
Mr. Reid: There are actually 13, and one exclusion. The exclusion is all documents that are part of cabinet deliberations. All cabinet documents are excluded.
The rest deal with, as you might expect, security measures, police records. They deal with privacy records, communications to ministers, internal debates among civil servants, in certain cases, and a range of items like that. They are the exceptions that you would expect.
Senator Comeau: One last area of questioning: My understanding is that the Crown corporations are not under your jurisdiction, so that they can say no if a request goes through.
Mr. Reid: A few Crown corporations are. There are some 18 that are not covered by the Access to Information Act. The President of the Treasury Board and the Minister of Justice are supposed to be looking at bringing the Crown corporations into the system. In my last annual report, I listed the kind of criteria that the government should look at in bringing in Crown corporations and what exceptions to the act might be necessary in some cases. One example that comes to mind quickly is the journalistic exception under the CBC.
Senator Comeau: I do not know if you are aware of it, but we have been looking over the past number of weeks at foundations that have been created either by acts of Parliament or under some other instruments. My understanding is that they are not under your responsibility.
Mr. Reid: That is correct, they are excluded.
Senator Comeau: Given the subject of a few minutes ago, regarding budgets, I did want to ask — and I imagine the budget question will probably play into this — should not these foundations be under your purview, given that this is public money and parliamentarians do have to respond to taxpayers? Part of your responsibility is to ensure that taxpayers are aware of what is going on. Should these foundations not be under your purview?
Mr. Reid: My view is that wherever government money goes, the taxpayer has a right to know how that money is being expended.
Senator Harb: Mr. Reid, you have made a compelling case for changing the present structure. As the chair so ably said, you are not the first. The Auditor General appeared before the committee and made the same case. It is my hope that this committee will look favourably on making some recommendation to the government to change the way we fund officers of Parliament. Your argument is that since are you an officer of Parliament, it should be Parliament that approves funding.
Looking at best practices internationally, are there other democracies with information commissioners whose models you think are inspiring, that we should as parliamentarians learn from, and of which, therefore, the government should take note?
Second, the balance between access to information and privacy is a debate that is worthwhile entering into. At what point will one say that this is the right of the public to know versus this is the right of the other party to privacy?
There is a protocol between your office and that of the Privacy Commissioner. From time to time, you meet and say that ``Notwithstanding information that comes from government as a result of the Information Act, we at the Office of the Information Commissioner feel it would infringe on the privacy of individuals. Therefore, we would want to have your input as Privacy Commissioner on whether or not that information should go out.''
I have heard some rumbling inside and outside government that at times we classify some documents that do not need to be classified as secret or protected because we do not want you to know. Is there some talk about returning to the formula that my colleague mentioned, in terms of these are the 13 or 14 different scenarios under which a document could be classified, otherwise, it is a right of the public to know?
My final question is if your proposal is to go ahead and the House of Commons adopts your idea, is there any thought about possibly introducing some kind of cost recovery? For example, if our chairman applied because he wanted access to information and he is able to pay, should there be a cost-recovery mechanism in place based on ability to pay and whereby you would have a source of revenue? You may already have that, I do not know. If you do not, is it within your jurisdiction to introduce such a mechanism if an institution, organization, media outlet or whatever made an application that could cost your office as well as the government a substantial amount of money? Could you say, ``Look, the $5 is great, but there are some other cost implications here and we would want you as an applicant to pay most of it, part of it or all of it''?
Mr. Reid: There are many questions there. Let me take them in order.
First, on the question of conflict between the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act, the Supreme Court has ruled in a number of cases that differences are to be minimized because, from their point of view, the two acts are the same. Therefore, any apparent disagreement is to be resolved in such a way as to do the least harm to both. That is the legal principle.
Second, the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act split the responsibility on questions of privacy in the following ways: The Information Commissioner has the responsibility for questions of privacy that abut access. When a request comes into the Office of the Information Commissioner, a decision is being made and there is a privacy concern, we will deal with it. Likewise, the Privacy Commissioner deals with your rights of access to your private information. When the Privacy Commissioner runs into a conflict between access and privacy in that field, it will be dealt with by the Privacy Commissioner. There is no exchange at all. We are self-contained in our legislation.
I have argued that the pattern in Canada, and in most jurisdictions, should be a unified office of access and privacy. When you come right down to it, there is not much conflict between access and privacy. If there is, it tends to be because the legislation is not properly drafted. Our legislation is well drafted from that point of view. I published a paper on our website — and circulated it to government officers — stating that the two offices should be united at some point. I did that when there was a vacancy in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, and that advice was not accepted by the government. However, that is my view and the paper is available on request or on my website.
The question of classification of documents is not the problem is used to be. Prior to the Access to Information Act, it used to be that if a document was marked ``secret,'' ``confidential,'' ``for your eyes only'' or ``eat after reading,'' that was it, you could not have it. Under the Access to Information Act, you have to cut out of a classified document that information that is not secret. In many cases, it will be background information or a series of other things that can come out. The information that is secret will remain so. That is why when people receive information through the Access to Information Act they will find lines and paragraphs blanked out. That is the information that is classified and does not come out. The problem that you mentioned, senator, has been solved in that way.
Lastly, on the question of funding, my idea was that it would be the Speakers of the House of Commons and the Senate who would make the presentation or move the matter on to the Treasury Board Secretariat.
The reason for that is it is my responsibility to report to Parliament, not to the House of Commons only, not to the Senate only, but to Parliament. That implies both Houses, so both Houses would take on the responsibility of looking at the funding requests I make, making some decisions as to whether they were appropriate or not, and then forwarding them to the Treasury Board Secretariat, or whatever mechanism is worked out.
The Chairman: In the case of the Senate, our Speaker is not elected but is appointed by and reports to the Prime Minister. If our Speaker were elected it would probably have more credence than the present system, because since our Speaker is appointed by the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister has some say in what that Speaker does.
Mr. Reid: I understand that; however, I believe that there has to be an appropriate mechanism and I have to believe that the Speaker of the Senate will fulfil his responsibilities in an appropriate way. I am sure one appropriate way for this to occur would be for the Speakers to refer this material either to the Internal Economy Committee or a public committee, which I would prefer, for discussion before a decision is made. I think a decision affecting parliamentary officers should come from Parliament.
Senator Comeau: It might not be viewed very positively by many in the Senate were it to be the Speaker, given that, as Senator Oliver said, he reports to the Prime Minister. A possible way out of this might be to ask that the Chair of the Internal Economy Committee, who is an officer of parliamentarians in the Senate, undertake the responsibility.
Mr. Reid: I am open to any mechanism.
The Chairman: There was another part to Senator Harb's question about cost recovery to which you did not refer.
Mr. Reid: Cost recovery is organized through Treasury Board, which has the right to make sure it is done as it sees fit. Right now, cost recovery takes three forms: First, there is the $5 that is collected when you make an access request. On the other hand, if you make a request for your personal information under the privacy legislation there is no charge. One of the reasons for that is it is assumed that you are asking for your own information when you ask for your own documentation, which the government holds in trust for you.
Second, there is a provision in the act that says that when you make an access request, you get five free hours of search time, and then after that, the Treasury Board can set a price on how much search time will take place after those five hours. Lastly, there is a cost for the reproduction of materials. I believe that is about 20 cents a page for copying. Those are the costs involved.
Now, there has been a debate about whether there should be cost recovery, and the insider task force recommended that there be a significant increase in costs, but not to the level of cost recovery. I took the position that the owner of this information is not the government, but the citizen, and therefore there should be some costs incurred for reproduction and mechanical things of that nature, but I did not feel it was fair to charge costs for material that actually belongs to you, the citizen.
Senator Harb: If the person accesses the information in order to put this documentation on the market, it is no longer a private citizen, but rather a corporation of sorts that, in essence, is deriving a financial benefit as a result of that information.
Mr. Reid: I understand the argument. The problem is that is not the way the system operates. For example, I can be a corporation and there is a contract that I would like to win. I can put in a request. Am I selling it to anyone? No. What am I trying to do? I am trying to track the progress of my contract application or my bid. It may be that I am a competitor of yours and I am trying to track the progress of your bid as well and to find out what is going on. It becomes difficult.
For example, we have had cases in which people have been happy to pay tremendous amounts of money for a lot of documentation. I have seen a cheque for about $1 million go through when someone wanted information of which the government had a great deal. The government was happy to give it and the applicant paid the full reproduction costs.
I have seen cases where the government has said ``Yes, the documentation is all there. We advise you to bring in your own people and your own copy machine and do it that way, it is cheaper.''
You have to understand, though, that most of the requests are for small amounts of information. Eighty per cent of the documents are less than 100 pages. Very few people make second, third and fourth requests, and a lot of people are what you might call in the business, people who do that because the individuals asking for the information do not want their identities known. Even though the act says that your identity should be protected when you make a request, there have been cases where the identities have gone through the system, so this is a safety precaution. It is much more complex than just saying this request falls into this category, because you do not know that unless you ask a whole series of questions.
Senator Ringuette: My line of questioning concerns user fees, cost recovery and so forth. In your annual report of 2003-04 you state that you have received 22,000 requests for access to information per year. Has there been an increase, constant increase, or is it stable?
Mr. Reid: When the act came into effect in 1983 the estimation was that there would be 50,000 requests a year, and going up from there. It took 10 years before we got a total of 50,000 requests. We see an increase each year of 2 per cent to 3 per cent in the number of requests coming into the system. I believe that this year the total number of requests coming into the system will be up to about 25,000. Of that, about 9 per cent are complaints. Therefore, my workload is based upon the complaint ratio.
Senator Ringuette: I must admit that I am surprised at the low fees. A $5 fee for access to information is, from my perspective, very low, because I would venture that probably just your fixed processing costs, never mind the administrative cost of that $5 per request, are probably between $25 and $30.
Mr. Reid: I agree with that. My recommendation has been to do away with the fee, because if it is costing you $25 to process a $5 fee, you will save $25 automatically without the fee. Otherwise, to break even, the fee would have to be $25 or $30. Why would you want to break even? Why not just save the $25 and not collect the fee?
Senator Ringuette: Then I suppose the argument would be if you do not have that minimum fee, there will be a lot of needless or excessive requests for information.
The Chairman: Do you anticipate that would happen?
Mr. Reid: I do not believe that in current society, a fee of $5 set in 1983 is much of a barrier. It is an annoyance to both the government and the individual. There is no fee if you access your information through the Privacy Commissioner.
Senator Ringuette: Last autumn, Parliament passed what we call a user fee bill. Have you looked into that bill?
Mr. Reid: It does not apply to the Access to Information Act because the fee structure, and what can and cannot be done, is in the act. There is an override clause in it that means that any changes have to be done through an amendment to the Access to Information Act. General legislation would not have an impact on the Access to Information Act or the Privacy Act.
Senator Ringuette: How many of those 22,000 requests would be from the public and how many from members of Parliament?
Mr. Reid: The breakdown that Treasury Board provides us is the following: About 40 per cent of the requests coming into the system are from business; 5 per cent are from members of Parliament; about 45 per cent that come in from citizens in general cannot be identified; and 2 per cent or 3 per cent come from the academic community.
Even then, it is difficult to categorize many of these because you do not have access to the names, and if you wanted to have access to the names, you would have to ask, and nobody wants to do that.
Senator Stollery: What percentage of these applications is from professionals, namely, people who make their living out of access to information requests?
Mr. Reid: They would be lumped in with the business community, the 40 per cent, but they are a relatively small number.
Mr. J.G.D. (Dan) Dupuis, Director General, Investigations and Reviews, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada: It would not even be 1 per cent. There are a few people who do this, because you see them in Ottawa, but they are representing other individuals. If they are trying to make money, as Senator Harb was saying, the government turns it into money itself when it finds out something is being asked on a regular basis and there is a general need in the public for it. The government normally turns it into value.
Senator Day: What percentage of that was media, because they are making money out of getting this information and running stories on access to information?
Mr. Reid: First, there are media requests themselves, but there is another factor, namely, that when people feel they have information that shows the government has done badly by them, they will get the media to write stories about it. There is this free flow of material going into the media, including the material they ask for themselves, the material they are given by others who are looking to develop a case, and maybe material they have commissioned through some of these regular requesters to protect their identities.
Senator Day: Therefore, a big chunk of the business is media, and they may well be involved with some of the other citizens.
Mr. Reid: The media do not make up more than 1 per cent or 2 per cent of the requests coming in from that business category.
Senator Day: As you say, they might also be writing articles based on information fed to them by citizens who have acquired it.
Mr. Reid: Yes, citizens who have problems, and political parties of all stripes, use the Access to Information Act a great deal.
I can recall one individual who was looking at information flows who concluded that members of all political parties use the Access to Information Act. I did not ask whether the Senate did or not, but his view was that members of all political parties were quite active.
Senator Ringuette: You stated that you have made requests for additional money in your base budgeting, and I am looking at this $5 fee, fixed in 1983. It is now 20-some years later, and it is still at $5. What is the present value of that $5 set in 1983? You said that you have met with Treasury Board. Did you discuss or propose a user fee or an increase in fees to access information?
Mr. Reid: No, I never have, and the reason is I have always looked at the fee structure for people coming into the system as a loss for the government. As you pointed out, it costs money for the government to process these requests. For the government to make money from a fee, it would have to charge probably $35 or $40. The fee was originally seen as a small barrier to ensure the requests would be serious, but I do not think that is required any more. If you look at the fee structure, the money does not come to the Information Commissioner, or to the ATIP office in the department. It goes into the government's Consolidated Revenue Fund for distribution in other ways.
Senator Ringuette: You absorb the administrative costs.
Mr. Reid: I absorb the costs of an investigation, but the departments absorb the costs of processing the application.
The Chairman: When you made the requests for $2 million to the Treasury Board, did you factor in increased administrative costs?
Mr. Reid: No, I am looking for investigators, not for anyone else, because I have a year's backlog and I cannot keep up with what is coming in. If I get a constant 8 per cent to 9 per cent of all the requests coming into the system, then I need a certain increase on a yearly basis to meet that obligation. I have not had that increase.
Senator Ringuette: You said that you have 23 investigators, but here we see in your planned spending ending this March, 56 full-time people.
Mr. Reid: That is my total office.
Senator Ringuette: Then there are 33 other people, and less than half your staff is doing the actual work of investigating.
Mr. Reid: I will give you a breakdown of my staff. I have 22 or 23 investigators, a director general of legal services and three juniors. That is my legal/investigatory staff.
You may recall at one time the Information Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner had a joint administration. When that came to an end, there was a significant increase in my staff in corporate affairs, because all of a sudden, I had to carry out the workload that Treasury Board imposes on us. I had to increase my staff there to meet Treasury Board standards and obligations.
We have to file, as a very small agency, something like 100 reports a year to Treasury Board, and they are mind- numbingly complex.
Senator Ringuette: What reports do you have to file?
Mr. Reid: We have to file 100 reports a year to Treasury Board on our various financial activities.
Ms. Ruth McEwan, Director General, Corporate Services, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada: Those are not to just to Treasury Board but also to central agencies, and it is over 100.
Mr. Reid: That comes out of corporate affairs.
Senator Ringuette: Most of your staff is working on 100 reports.
Mr. Reid: I have my corporate affairs staff, which is the one that has grown because of the split between the Privacy Commissioner and the Information Commissioner. It is amazing what Treasury Board demands of a small agency with $5 million in terms of the reporting that we have to do. We scramble to meet those deadlines.
Senator Murray: Well, I might as well confess my bias, with which you may be familiar anyway, but in the inevitable tension between access to information and privacy, I tilt towards privacy, and in the inevitable tension between access to information and the need for proper government secrecy, which is the underpinning of cabinet solidarity — which in turn is the underpinning of our system of government — I tilt that way, too.
I was mildly scandalized when you tried to get your hands on — and I gather you eventually succeeded — Mr. Chrétien's diaries, because I am sure he and others among us keep not only our official engagements and whatnot in those diaries, but all kinds of personal material that he or we would not want to share with anyone, even as trusted an official as yourself. I am sure Mr. Chrétien's successors, and others, will know how to keep diaries in the future.
All that being said, I agree with you completely about the funding issue. As an officer of Parliament, Parliament should examine your budget and put it forward to Treasury Board. No officer of Parliament should have to go cap in hand to the Treasury Board or to the government. I do not think the status of our Speaker creates a big problem, because the main issue will be to have a committee of the Senate and of the House, or a joint committee, meet with you and with the other officers of Parliament to go through the budgets on both an annual and a long-term basis. I think that is very important. Mr. Alcock, the President of the Treasury Board, indicated that he was close to a solution to this problem.
I am old enough to remember, as are you, Mr. Reid, when parliamentarians seeking information would put down a motion for the production of papers, and the government would produce the papers. Sometimes they were subject to federal-provincial relations, international considerations or whatever, but they were produced. If the government did not want to produce them, they put the motion down for a debate on the issue.
I tried that a couple of years ago and the government told me that I could ask for no more than I could get under the Access to Information Act. I dispute that contention, and disputed it at the time, without too much success. They quoted back to me something that I purportedly said in another life, but I have not finished with it yet. I think that what I may have said in another life is irrelevant now, and probably was then.
I am interested in what you said about the volume of requests, where they come from and so forth. How do you know that? Do you not come in at the stage where there is an appeal or a complaint? I should know this, but do you have a monitoring role, or is it just a matter of asking Treasury Board?
Mr. Reid: Treasury Board produces a document every year called Info Source that purports to be a description of all the filings the federal government has. In that document they provide the breakdown I gave you as to where the requests come from. You are right; I only see them when there is a complaint. Therefore, I see a very small swath, and these tend to be the sophisticated complainants who understand how the act operates and usually have a good idea of the government holdings they are trying to penetrate. Treasury Board has the responsibility for that kind of monitoring. They do produce a spreadsheet of their material from the departments once a year, and each department provides a breakdown by category in their annual report as to who was making requests under the Access to Information Act.
Senator Murray: Is there one source to which one could go to get the information?
Mr. Reid: Info Source will have that kind of information. We do monitoring of our own and we publish all the results in our annual report.
Senator Murray: What do you monitor?
Mr. Reid: We have a report card system whereby we look at the departments that are not meeting certain criteria that we have set out.
Senator Murray: How do you know?
Mr. Reid: We look at the complaints, but we also look at other figures. Each year, we choose 10 or 11 departments. We give them a questionnaire and talk to them about the results of that questionnaire. We form some conclusions, have a discussion with the senior officials responsible for ATIP, and then we publish.
Senator Murray: So you do have a monitoring role under the act?
Mr. Reid: We have a monitoring role that was acquired under my predecessors, but it is not in the act. We have a general responsibility to defend the act, so this monitoring role that we have taken up arose because the departments were no longer meeting the letter of the law, that is, to produce information within the 30 days outlined in the act. It became important for us to find out what was wrong, what was going on.
Senator Murray: Info Source would indicate in some general way, although perhaps not as specifically as some of us would like, where the requests come from, to what departments or agencies they are directed and the costs to the government?
Mr. Reid: The cost to the government has been the work of the Canada Consulting Group. Every three or four years, they get a contract from Treasury Board to do an examination of the costs of the program. The last one was done two years ago. This looks at the total costs of the program. The departments also report their annual costs in their annual reports. Treasury Board produces a spreadsheet with all the basic statistics so that one can see what goes on at a glance.
I have had arguments with Treasury Board as to the adequacy of that because I believe they should be producing more statistics. It is now easy to do so because all the departments use a program called ATIPflow that logs all the activities that take place for both privacy and access. We could get better information.
Senator Murray: Explain to my simple mind the need for all these investigators. What is there to investigate? I put in an ATI request and the information comes back with too many paragraphs blacked out, so I tell your people that the information I am really looking for has been blacked out, purportedly for security reasons or whatever, and ask them to try to get me that information.
What is to investigate? The facts are obvious in the first instance. I have been denied this information. You are able to look at the information that has been severed?
Mr. Reid: That is correct. The first thing we do is get the documents.
Senator Murray: Then you look at them and express an opinion to the government that some of the information did not need to be severed?
Mr. Reid: We look at the information and make a determination as to whether the severing has been done in accordance with the act.
Senator Murray: What do you mean by that? Mr. Reid, if the government invokes the exemption that release of the information would be prejudicial to federal-provincial relations, how do you decide that it is not prejudicial? One time years ago, when Mr. Chrétien was in charge of that issue, they were conducting polls, and when I asked, not under ATI but under production of papers, to see the questions, he responded that it would be prejudicial to federal-provincial relations. I said, ``If it would be prejudicial to federal-provincial relations, why did you ask the questions?'' They just laughed.
How do you decide that it is not? How do you substitute your judgment for theirs? If they say it is prejudicial to federal-provincial relations and you find that it has nothing to do with federal-provincial relations, international relations, security or whatever, you have an open-and-shut case. How do you substitute your judgment for theirs on a matter of that kind?
Mr. Reid: Both our office and the departments now have access to some 23 years of jurisprudence, and we have a number of court cases from both the Trial Division of the Federal Court and the Supreme Court.
We have pretty clear guidelines as to where those boundaries are. What I normally find is that once you look at the information in dispute, it is pretty clear as to whether it fits the category or not. It must fit the category.
Senator Murray: Are you saying that if it fits the category, you will not substitute your judgment as to whether or not it will be prejudicial?
Mr. Reid: Of course not. If it fits the category within the law, then that is a legitimate severing and we support that.
Senator Murray: Is ``investigator'' the right name for these people?
Mr. Reid: Yes.
Senator Murray: What do they have to investigate?
Mr. Reid: You get the documents and you start going through them. You are looking at what has been severed and what has been eliminated.
Senator Murray: How many people are cleared to do that?
Mr. Reid: Basically, everybody in my office, including clerical staff, is cleared by the RCMP. The reason for that is that the documents in question are in dispute. The government wants, properly, to have the highest possible security. We ensure that that security is in place, with the cooperation of the RCMP and other security agencies.
Senator Murray: They send for the papers.
Mr. Reid: We get the papers.
Senator Murray: What is severed?
Mr. Reid: We go through them to see what is severed. What we find, as you might expect, is that about 65 per cent of the time, we support the severing that the government has done. Approximately 35 per cent of the time there are disputes. Generally speaking, we are able to work those disputes out.
The Chairman: Do you find more disputes in some departments than in others?
Mr. Reid: Generally speaking, I would say some departments are testier than others. We are very proud of the fact that we are probably the leading experts in the Canadian government on alternative dispute resolution. We only end up taking about two cases a year to court. That has been the pattern in this office for the past 20 years. Those are the cases that have totally gone bad.
We are able to work out, after a certain amount of difficulty sometimes, it is true, an appropriate modus vivendi.
Senator Murray: The investigator looks at the document, makes a judgment, gets back to the department, and that is it?
Mr. Reid: Usually, a lot of toing and froing goes on. Often, there is information that departments will not want to see go out. One of my favourite excuses is that, ``I am sorry, but embarrassment is not one of the 13 criteria.''
Senator Murray: It will be.
You would have this information. I do not know whether it is on the top of your head, but in terms of the complaints that are made — this is probably in your report, which I confess I have not read — there is, first, the obvious one, that they have not produced the document in the time allotted, and there is the severing of information or the complete refusal to produce the document. Can you tell by looking at the volume what the complaints are?
Mr. Reid: Another complaint is if the file is incomplete. When I became the Information Commissioner, it became clear to me that the filing system in the Government of Canada is pretty deficient. We became very interested in the question of document management within the Government of Canada. We were ordering searches over and above the original searches for documentation that had been done in departments. We were finding that there were additional documents coming in, not just on the periphery, but core documents that had been missed. When the federal government cutbacks were made in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the first thing that went was that kind of infrastructure.
The government was also caught in a hybrid system, because we were moving from paper to computers, that is, digital information. The entire system is still in a form of flux. We find that ensuring that all of the documents have been searched can be a problem.
Senator Murray: Tell me the first, second and third factors, off the top of your head, if you could.
Mr. Reid: The first one we usually get is time delays. When I started, that was about 40 per cent of our workload. It dropped down to about 14 per cent. It is now up to about 18 or 19 per cent and climbing, so we are worried about that.
It is hard to say what the others are. A member of Parliament or an individual will come back to us and say, ``I know that these files should be better than they are. I did not get all of the material or find out whether the entire file has been acquired, and then whether these cuts they have made are correct or incorrect.''
Mr. Dupuis: Senator Murray, only 10 per cent of requests turn into complaints. Canadians and users of the system are very content with the other 90 per cent of the work.
Mr. Reid: That is a very high percentage of contentment.
Mr. Dupuis: As Mr. Reid pointed out, when he took the post, 40 per cent to 50 per cent of our work involved delays. The department was not able to meet the statutory time frames. With his zero-tolerance approach, that figure has been brought down to 14 per cent to 18 per cent. The next largest category is no doubt the exemptions, which are between 13 per cent and 26 per cent — federal-provincial affairs, international affairs, solicitor-client privilege, privacy requests, et cetera. That is a combination throughout those files.
Our success rate in meeting with the departmental officials throughout the process is very high, because there are only one or two cases a year that we refer to the federal court. On the subject of polls, which was mentioned previously, we brought that matter to the court, which agreed that those polls should be disclosed by the previous government. That is an example of where it was claimed that it was prejudicial to federal-provincial affairs and the country would fall apart.
As investigators, we meet with the various officials to whom the minister has delegated the authority to make the decisions. You are absolutely correct; we cannot substitute our discretion over theirs if it is a discretionary exemption. If it is a mandatory exemption, we will look for proof that it meets the mandatory tests, what is called a class test. We will look for that evidence. If it is information received in confidence from a province or another country, we will look for those memorandums of agreement. In many cases, there is no evidence to demonstrate that.
I would like to return to Senator Comeau's comments about training and education. We have a very small turnover, fortunately, in our office. That has given us that expertise over the years. People stay in our office seven, eight and nine years. That makes it richer and we are grateful for that. In the departments, the turnover is much larger. That being said, there is a significant lack of education and knowledge in the departments. There we play our role, and we meet with these officials, known as ATIP officers, who may not have the same knowledge and experience that we do. By sharing our knowledge and having good dialogue, we are able to come to resolutions with them.
It is not so much adversarial as a matter of communication, if I may use that approach. It is really an issue of exchanging views. We cannot impose our discretion, but the courts have made clear that we must find out how they exercised their discretion, and what was before the officials when they did so — was it fair or was it capricious or frivolous. It is not a complex system; it is very informal, but based on knowledge and good investigative work.
Another category, as Commissioner Reid referred to, was incomplete files, inadequate searches. Commissioner Reid has spoken often over the years about deteriorating information management in government. More and more, it is difficult to find the files and the actual records. That is a tedious item for us, but I would not want to say it is bad faith, it is inadequate searches.
Senator Murray: Let me add that, notwithstanding my biases, which I have declared, I agree with you, and with those assisting, that Crown corporations and these new foundations ought to be subject to ATI. They would have to make a pretty strong argument to persuade me that they ought not to be subject to ATI, privacy, official languages and other statutes.
[Translation]
Senator Day: What percentage of the complaints, based on your statistics?
Mr. Dupuis: Our annual report indicates that more than 50 per cent of complaints are resolved in favour of other releases. It is not so much a refusal on the part of the government as a lack of knowledge.
With respect to delays, if someone complains about not receiving documents, that is 100 per cent. We try to figure out when the document could be provided. After consideration, we reach a conclusion with respect to its release and then follow up. The department is very cooperative. The department puts in pretty much the same effort as we do and, like us, it lacks resources and knowledge.
[English]
Senator Day: Ms. McEwan, you indicated that you have about 100 reports — which is a phenomenal number — you have to file with Treasury Board and other internal central agencies. You also suggested earlier that at one time, privacy and access to information were combined. Has that corporate administrative workload been roughly the same since, or have you seen a marked increase in the last few years in the number of reports that you are required to file?
Ms. McEwan: I would say that we have seen increases in the number of reports that we are required to file, based on the many initiatives that are currently ongoing.
Senator Day: In the last two years, for example, has it gone up quite considerably?
Ms. McEwan: I would not say quite considerably. There has been an incremental increase, because we have always been required to produce a lot of reports for central agencies.
Senator Day: The Auditor General has commented on the added burden because of all these reviews.
Ms. McEwan: Yes.
Senator Day: Do you reflect that in your account?
Ms. McEwan: Yes, definitely.
Senator Day: My final question is for Mr. Reid. It relates to your special report and the wish list that you talked about. I think we discussed some of the points here. Are there others that you would like to tell us about today? I assume, from the material that I have read, you were reacting to a report generated by a task force that involved Treasury Board. I assume also that the theme of the Treasury Board report was along the lines of what Senator Murray was talking about, reducing the amount of access to information, whereas your report presumably advocated increasing the amount of information that should be available to the public. Am I right in those assumptions?
Mr. Reid: They are interesting assumptions, but there was a task force of the Treasury Board and the Department of Justice in 2002 that recommended a significant change in the amount of information that would go out to citizens of Canada. My report was based on rebutting that and looking for changes that would improve the system for Canadians.
I have always taken the position that it is not for the Information Commissioner to say whether or not the amount of information that goes out should be increased or reduced; that that is properly done by members of Parliament — the House of Commons and the Senate — because it has to do with policy. My job is to ensure that the system is operating as well as possible. Therefore, my recommendations were based on that.
However, I did take the position in my report that any time a suggestion was made to reduce the flow of information going out now, there had to be a justification in terms of harm to the governmental system. In my judgment, after reading the task force report, there was no justification of harm when they made these recommendations. For example, one of their recommendations was that civil servants should have a private file into which they could put their most personal thoughts on government policy and which would not be accessible under the Access to Information Act, nor would it be accessible to their superiors. It is a strange philosophy, in my judgment, whereby you encourage people to keep a commentary on government policy that they are responsible for, but which nobody can see, including their employers.
Senator Day: I do not mean to interrupt your train of thought, but did it specifically say ``government policy,'' or was it private matters? They might be personnel matters — I do not like the boss, that kind of thing.
Mr. Reid: You have to understand that under the Access to Information Act, if it is a private matter it does not go out under any circumstances. There was no need for additional protection. It was their commentary on whatever that would be sealed off. What would be in there, nobody would know. It could be government documents that ordinarily should be made available, but nobody could look in it to see.
Senator Day: Just as Ms. McEwan's file on 100 reports a year is silly, that would presumably be a government policy that they would recommend should not become available.
Mr. Reid: Maybe not, because sometimes, Treasury Board likes to receive criticism of some of its activities so that they can look at what they actually do, as opposed to what they think they do.
There was a whole series of recommendations that were intended to reduce the amount of information available. My judgment is that yes, there may be circumstances where that should happen, but let us be very clear about what we are doing. In my judgment, there was anecdotal evidence, but there was no really detailed work to show that if you took information out of the system as it now, there would be a significant benefit to the government and a lack of harm to the citizen who can access that information now.
Senator Stollery: I would like you to repeat those numbers on who makes these requests for information. I am one of those who have no problem with a certain amount of government secrecy. In my years here I do not think there has ever been anything that I wanted to know that I was not able to find out, and I have never used the Access to Information Act. I was the parliamentary secretary who put it through the committee in the House of Commons originally. Therefore, these numbers interest me, because at the time of the access to information bill, I recall how the government reacted to what, in effect, was a very small amount of pressure by a very small number of people. I recall that as if it were yesterday.
I believe that you are confirming that. As I say, this is for my own curiosity, in that there have been considerably fewer requests over the years than were contemplated when the legislation was passed; is that right?
Mr. Reid: That is correct. However, on the other side of the equation, all of the provinces now have access to information and privacy legislation. You have to combine all of that to get an idea of the burden on government and the opportunities for citizens. It becomes clear that many of the things that the federal government does do not touch citizens as much as the things that provinces do, so they tend to have a higher rate of activity.
Senator Stollery: I accept that. In terms of the federal access to information legislation, if I understood what you said, originally, 60,000 requests were contemplated?
Mr. Reid: Fifty thousand.
Senator Stollery: Fifty thousand.
Mr. Reid: This figure came from an estimation of what went into the United States freedom of information structure. They took 10 per cent of that, and that became the anticipated target. The government set up a structure that would be able to deal with 50,000 requests when the act came into effect in 1983.
Senator Stollery: The figure is 50,000. Could you run through those actual requests compared to the 50,000?
Mr. Dupuis: We would have to send them to you, senator. I believe the earlier quote was from the Treasury Board report and I do not have that before me. I do believe it is something like 25,000.
Senator Stollery: So about half, overall; and it has taken a while to get up to 25,000.
Mr. Dupuis: 23 years.
Senator Stollery: I imagine that 21 years ago it was relatively small. It would not have been 25,000, because it has taken 23 years to get up to that number.
Mr. Dupuis: You also have to give credit to the departments, senator. Many of them, when they see that something is being asked for on a regular basis, look for informal disclosures. Information is given out without people having to go to the Access to Information Act. There is credit due there, too.
Senator Stollery: My only other question, Mr. Chairman, is what percentage of the total requests is from business?
Mr. Reid: About 40 per cent.
Senator Stollery: Is that the largest percentage?
Mr. Reid: Yes.
Senator Day: Individuals are at 45 per cent.
Mr. Reid: For individuals, it is about 45 per cent.
Senator Stollery: What are the percentages for the rest?
Mr. Reid: We have very small numbers for members of Parliament, academics, journalists.
Senator Stollery: Therefore, 40 per cent of requests are from business — I will just leave it there. I must say that I have a difficult time trying to think of a business — it would have to be a business, presumably — that is dealing with government in some way. I am sure there are many things I have not thought of, but I wonder what we are doing providing a kind of service for business. The fees are set on a case-by-case basis, I suppose, depending on how complicated it is.
The Chairman: Just for the record, on the numbers that were referred to by a previous senator, it is stated that government institutions receive over 22,000 requests for access to information per year. The Office of the Information Commissioner receives complaints from individuals who are not satisfied with the results of their access requests and it also initiates investigations. Less than 10 per cent of applications for access to information result in complaints, of which 54 per cent concern allegations of excessive secrecy — and so on.
Mr. Reid, as you know, all of the officers of Parliament are appearing before this committee. At our next meeting, the Privacy Commissioner, Ms. Stoddart, will appear before us. I was wondering whether, formally or informally, you officers of Parliament meet. If so, do you have an agenda and do you hold discussions? In particular, have you discussed your funding formula?
Mr. Reid: I have fairly regular meetings with the Privacy Commissioner because we have a significant amount in common. The parliamentary officers have lunch about every three or four months to discuss matters in common. We have had some discussions on what might be an appropriate funding policy.
The dilemma that we all deal with is what is the appropriate form of accountability that will be satisfactory to Parliament? That accountability is now discharged by the Treasury Board.
Senator Harb: Are those lunches subject to access to information?
Mr. Reid: Those lunches? I am prepared to tell you everything you need to know.
The Chairman: I was planning to ask if we could have a copy of the minutes.
Mr. Reid: I am prepared to tell you everything you need to know.
The question that we have been debating is what is the appropriate way of doing it? The dilemma is that we all have different funding mechanisms. The Chief Electoral Officer has a particular one; the Auditor General has a particular funding mechanism. She also is a separate employer, which causes some complications. We have had discussions with the new Ethics Commissioner of the House of Commons about his funding formula and how that works.
The Chairman: Is he satisfied with it?
Mr. Reid: He has just gone through it for the first time. I learned the other day that the system is such that he gives his material to the Speaker, and then the Speaker sends it directly to Treasury Board. It does not go to any internal committee, like Internal Economy, nor does it go to a House of Commons committee. We know that you cannot run all six of us through a system without a proper investigation.
The Chairman: We have to have some parliamentary scrutiny.
Mr. Reid: There has to be some direct parliamentary scrutiny. The question we are wrestling with is do we go with a blue-ribbon committee of outsiders, or do we try to establish a blue-ribbon committee within Parliament to do that? Should that blue-ribbon committee be a joint committee, or should it be done separately in each House?
The problem with a blue-ribbon committee is that its recommendations come in, but in my experience —
The Chairman: They are in a vacuum.
Mr. Reid: They operate in somewhat of a vacuum, but their reports are properly subject to debate as well. We just saw that with the blue-ribbon committee looking at judges' salaries.
My view is that we have to find some way that satisfies the question of parliamentary control of Parliament's officers.
Senator Murray: It has to be the parliamentarians. The problem is that we do not have the people to do the kind of analytical work and so on that Treasury Board does, and we would have to find them.
Mr. Reid: I have suggested that the Treasury Board should continue to do the analytical work, and that all of those documents, which are now secret, be provided to Parliament so that they can be examined by the parliamentary people. If outside or internal experts are required, they too can be there. You should be able to see the results of the debate that takes place in Treasury Board over our documents, and you should be able to see the resulting documents that come out of the process. That would provide a significant degree of transparency and would allow the final decision as to funding to rest in your hands.
The dilemma, of course, as members know, is that Parliament can decrease but cannot increase budgets. If you get a chance to see the results of Treasury Board's analytical work, you could make your recommendations to your Speakers, who would then send the final report on to the Treasury Board for a decision. That is only one idea. There are a number of ways that you can go about it, but I feel it is absolutely necessary.
Senator Murray: Would it not be prepared for inclusion in the estimates? That is the way our own budgets are handled. It would be a rare occasion that Treasury Board would take that upon itself once we had gone through the exercise. We know there is some informal give and take, but once the House of Commons or the Senate sends a budget —
Senator Stollery: It has never been turned down.
Senator Murray: No; it goes to the Treasury Board for inclusion in the estimates.
Mr. Reid: That is what happens with the Ethics Commissioner. At present, he is in a start-up phase, and the idea was that you would look at the office in two years. The House of Commons has to think in terms of its Ethics Commissioner in a more serious way than the legislation does, in two or three years' time.
If you set up a system that will be workable, then you could bring the rest of the officers of Parliament into that system.
Senator Comeau: Except for the Auditor General, who reports to the House of Commons rather than to Parliament.
Mr. Reid: That is correct. Maybe that is a burden the House of Commons has to take on by itself — but certainly, it would work for the rest of us. However, you are right about the Auditor General, and probably the Chief Electoral Officer too reports only to the House of Commons. However, the rest of us report to both Houses.
The Chairman: Given that you have a huge workload that you are not able to complete because you are underfunded, what is your budget? Will you have a balanced budget this year, or an operating deficit?
What do your projections to March 31 look like?
Mr. Reid: We will break even.
Senator Day: On a point of clarification, Mr. Chair, you read the statistics for the Office of the Information Commissioner, but I was not certain if you said where they came from.
The Chairman: The Library of Parliament.
Senator Day: Is that research notes of the Library of Parliament?
The Chairman: Yes.
Senator Day: Perhaps we should ask the commissioner if he accepts that information.
The Chairman: Do you accept that the government has received 22,000 requests for access to information per year?
Mr. Reid: I think that is pretty accurate. That figure is probably a year old. The system has been averaging an increase of 2 per cent to 3 per cent per year.
Senator Day: Perhaps we could get up-to-date information for the use of this committee.
The Chairman: Mr. Reid, could you send us current information on this?
Mr. Reid: I will do that.
The Chairman: Mr. Reid, I wish to thank you and your officials for an interesting presentation. This committee is interested in budgets and how you spend your money. We had quite a revealing presentation from you that indicates that you are unable to do the job Canadians would like to see you doing because you are underfunded and there is not currently a proper funding mechanism in place. This committee will be looking at that. We thank you for your candour.
The committee adjourned.