I agree. There isn't anything available for us right now, the reason being that in some of the jurisdictions, things are so new that a lot of the points have not been fully identified and commented upon. In those international jurisdictions where they've had extensive experience and I'm sure some feedback, none of their documents are in either official language, so it's been a little difficult to encapsulate that information. We certainly will have to keep that in mind, because we obviously have to draw on the experience of other jurisdictions to the greatest extent possible. It will help us to do our work.
I suggest that we not do any travelling anywhere to talk to anybody about this until we can talk intelligently about the issues. A learning process has to go on, and I think we need to hear from the Access to Information Commissioner, the Privacy Commissioner, and the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner to assist us and give us dimensions of the concerns there.
We certainly want to hear from Treasury Board. We had some work on documents management; some areas in some departments within the Government of Canada are already doing work on this. I think we should be aware of their thinking and link ourselves to them. We don't want to duplicate any work that's going on. I think we can educate ourselves there.
I was personally very impressed with the work done by the Quebec government on this issue. I think that is one we would certainly want to hear from.
Madame Freeman has given us a range of possible witnesses. I'd like to ask the researchers if they could prepare that full list and provide some preliminary information by finding out a little bit of background on the people, such as what their disciplines are, how they would group, and the areas they would fit into. Then at some point we will make contact to find out whether they would be available and then work out the timeframe, etc. This takes some work, and it's something they can be doing in the background.
One of the notes I made.... Well, there are many notes; I am a little concerned that we could very easily get buried in this project. I think we have to assume that we are starting from scratch. To me, the documents represented a significant body of work that's already been done on the subject matter, and a lot of progress in jurisdictions.
I think it's really important for us not to be too aggressive on the deliverable we're after. I don't think we've identified the deliverable. If we are going to do a report to Parliament on this first phase, what will that report try to say? I think we haven't defined that.
I certainly think one of the things we should consider in our discussions is whether we're trying to address a problem or whether we are trying to get involved in moving Canada further down the road of proactive disclosure and open government.
I think one of the reasons we identified the project in the first place was that the access to information system has problems. The bottlenecks are there. The timeliness of response isn't there. I think we have to answer this: is there anything we could do that would help to address that problem, and is proactive disclosure one of the tools we could use? I hope we're going to be able to answer that question.
Maybe we should think about that a little more, but I think I would like to hear from the Access to Information Commissioner. I think there was one...was it Citizenship and Immigration that represented a very large percentage of the requests?
If there was a system in place for information related to citizenship and immigration matters, would it significantly reduce the workload? Keeping in mind that not everyone is computer literate and we're going to have to continue to operate within the existing system, where are the efficiencies and what are we going to be able to deliver? I hope we can keep that in mind. I don't think we have defined the objective yet.
I think we can start very quickly in terms of educating ourselves and hearing internally as well as from the Information Commissioner, Treasury Board, and others. I think we should then proceed to find a timeframe in which they would be available. I think the first one we have is the Information Commissioner. The other two commissioners have been invited to give us ideas and concerns from their perspective and to help us with the dimensions. We're going to be doing that.
All right. I've said enough. I want to go back.
We have Madame Freeman.