The points I made were, first of all, to discontinue the practice of circulating the occupation of requesters both within departments and to central agencies, because it is unnecessary. It's not necessary for the proper administration of the law, and it creates a potential threat to privacy.
The second was a requirement that departments notify requesters if their requests have been tracked into special processes, whether we're going to call them amber lighting or processes for interesting requests, or so on.
The next two really have to do with bolstering the enforcement mechanisms in cases where there are lapses in compliance. The first is to improve the status of the access to information coordinator by formally acknowledging that role within the legislation, in order to give them more clout in enforcing the principles of the law within the department. And the last recommendation was reform of the funding mechanism for the Office of the Information Commissioner, which I believe this committee may have addressed earlier.
This may seem a long way off the topic, but if there were effective remedies in cases of delay, or if there was an external organization—such as the Office of the Information Commissioner—able to monitor problems of systemic discrimination, we might not worry so much about these practices. The problem is that we have departments investing heavily in bureaucratic routines to coordinate their responses to the requests, and an overseer, a commissioner, who is starved of the resources necessary to police the system.