Information & Ethics Committee on May 13th, 2009

[Robert Marleau]

The new intake unit essentially, to describe it, receives the complaint, does an early evaluation of it, gathers the information, makes a first stab at trying to resolve it, either because there's misunderstanding or by talking to the department, to move it along. If it can't be resolved in a timely fashion, then it transfers it over to the complaints resolution and compliance unit, and a formal investigation takes place.

The idea is to allow the investigators to investigate and alleviate them from any of the administrative burden of preparing the file, getting the documents, and liaising with the departments. So by the time the investigator gets it, he or she is off and running for the investigation.

It's a pilot project. It has its hiccups from a management point of view and in terms of doing it better, but it has, I think, dealt with some 600 files—I won't call them investigations, because some of them may have never been investigations—that didn't get transferred over to the investigation unit. I read that as a pretty strong efficiency result, even though it's not perfect.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

If a person were ever to try to get their head around the possibility of charging data brokers and so on, would there be a time, while you're doing your pilot project, that you could take a look at it, just to see whether it would fit in at that time?

[Robert Marleau]

I only deal with complaints, which is about 7% of what the whole system sees by way of access requests, so statistically I'm not sure I'm in a position to make that judgment.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

I was curious whether, if a person ever thought we might want to look at it, this might be an opportunity at least to dig up some information. At least then, if we talk about this another time, we might be ahead of the curve on it.

[Robert Marleau]

Under current statute, the requester and the complainant are confidential, so it would only be high-level. All I can say is what I said to the committee before. When it comes to frequent complainers or frequent users, the problem for my office appears large—it's 50% of the business—but with discretion on investigation, I could solve it overnight.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

You mean, rather than another recommendation.

All right, thanks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Thank you.

Mr. Siksay, please.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Commissioner, I want to come back to table 1, to the commissioner-initiated complaints column there. You said the 393 complaints that were initiated by the previous commissioner pertained mainly to CBSA. Was it mainly or entirely CBSA?

[Robert Marleau]

It was entirely CBSA.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Can you characterize the systemic issue that the commissioner was concerned about with those complaints? I think you said that you saw it as a systemic issue and that this was the concern. Can you characterize it for us? What was the commissioner after there, or concerned about?

[Robert Marleau]

I would have to refresh my memory on it, since I wasn't involved directly. I have had it for two years now. I really wouldn't want to risk an answer by way of characterizing it.

What I remember is that they were all similar complaints from the same individual, and therefore it falls within the kind of discretion I have under the statute to say I'm going to put these all together and treat them as a commissioner complaint and move forward that way, rather than fan out 393 across the organization.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

You say that you think it's probably better to deal with it in a systemic way through the report card system. Can you explain to me the sort of reasoning that goes into that decision? If these are systemic complaints and were dealt with by the commissioner in that particular way, how does the report card issue deal with those?

[Robert Marleau]

What the report card does, I believe, is bring discipline to the system. You know, Justice got five stars last year. Do you think they want four stars next year? They will want to try to maintain that.

We looked at extensions and the use of extensions and the context. We found some serious systemic issues, and we made 10 recommendations to the Treasury Board. Rather than just rank performance by department, what we did was extract, from what we saw in the individual departments, the systemic issues that were kind of repeated across the system, and we dealt with them with a recommendation.

In that sense, the whole system's on notice right now that we're interested in extensions and we're going to be looking at them. So already we're hearing from the departments, in terms of that dynamic of trying to create better compliance, that they're paying attention to extensions. I think that's more efficient than my starting a specific within-a-department, self-initiated complaint.

We hear a lot of stuff right now about difficulties at DFAIT. I'd rather deal with it as a systemic issue, because there's a strong possibility that if something is going awry in one department, the same thing is going on in the others.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Was CBSA one of the departments you referred and did a report card on this year?

[Robert Marleau]

Yes.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

You made recommendations for them about how to.... I can't remember their grade. I'm sorry, I didn't bring the report card with me. I think it was one of the ones there was a big concern about, though.

[Robert Marleau]

That's right. They had improved over the previous year, but they were still falling short of the grade. Now, they have had a tremendous increase in the number of pages to review as well.

The other thing the report cards bring is context. It's one thing if you have the war in Afghanistan and National Defence is getting a certain number of requests that they normally might not get. CBSA was in the same situation.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

For CBSA, you made some specific recommendations to them. Now, do you do ongoing monitoring of their compliance and their response to those recommendations?

[Robert Marleau]

Yes, you will find in the report CBSA's response to our recommendations and an action plan for correction. That's another dimension of the report card that wasn't there before and that we're now publishing and making available to Parliament.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

So you are following up on their implementation of their action plan.

[Robert Marleau]

Yes, and we'll be following up on, actually, the whole report.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

How do you follow up on their action plan?

[Robert Marleau]

Suzanne is responsible for the whole report card process.

[Suzanne Legault]

This is our first exercise, so we haven't started to do the follow-up. But the intent is really to always do a three-year cycle with the report cards. So we do the report card, then we will do.... The next exercise this year will include a follow-up on the action plans of the institutions that were covered, and if they self-correct, we would not carry them on for the following year. But if they don't, we would follow up the following year.

The idea also is to provide advance notice to other institutions, such as the new institutions or the crown corporations that were added. Once we decide to do a report card on these institutions, we will give them advance notice. The idea is not to have a “get you” attitude. It is to give them an opportunity to self-discipline in advance, even, of our report cards.

The other thing the report cards do is provide this information in terms of the systemic formal investigation we want to follow up with. For instance, what we have found here is that the incidence of very lengthy extensions that are taken by institutions are extremely problematic in terms of access rights. So we're planning to follow up with a formal systemic investigation on extensions, which will go further on one of the issues specifically addressed in the report card. That's how they now flow together as opposed to being ad hoc and separate. They're more strategic.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

All right.

Thank you, Chair.