Thank you for your question, Mr. Chair.
I can assure you that the Privy Council Office is not excluded from the Access to Information Act.
First of all, I think it is important to appreciate that, based on the non-partisan nature of the public service, departments and ministers' offices have two complementary but different sets of rules around records management.
Ministers' offices are governed by various pieces of legislation and policies and court decisions. One of the things these say is that records of ministers' offices are not subject to the Access to Information Act unless they're under the control of the department. They also say that ministers' offices have to manage their records in a certain way.
On the public service side, we also follow the rules set out in various policies and pieces of legislation that tell us what to keep and what to delete. For example—