Information & Ethics committee  I spent the first 30 days, virtually the whole of February, studying the substantive issues surrounding the debate on the bill the committee recommended to the minister. I also presented my credentials to the lead ministers. My priority is to develop, together with Treasury Boar

Information & Ethics committee  I have no order-making powers of any kind.

Information & Ethics committee  They have to invoke a specific exemption under the statute. Apart from the practice in our office, there's also a lot of jurisprudence around all of those exemptions, whether they're mandatory or discretionary.

Information & Ethics committee  We put it in part III on a recommendation from Treasury Board.

Information & Ethics committee  No, sir. We were ready for the implementation of the Accountability Act both internally and in the context of the expanded scope. Internally we now have an ATIP coordinator because we're subject to the act. We didn't rush out to hire a whole bunch more investigators, anticipating

Information & Ethics committee  We anticipate we will need three or four. We could be wrong on that, because a lot of new organizations out there are staring at the statute for the first time, so there may be a bit of a bulge. But once they get up to speed, we're probably looking at the same kind of curve as we

Information & Ethics committee  The answer to that, sir, is that what you're getting at this time on the supply cycle is part II and part III of the estimates. The performance report that you just referred to actually gets tabled in the House in the early fall. So there's no way we can get it to you any earlier

Information & Ethics committee  In another life I was also concerned about the delays of information coming to Parliament, and I even made recommendations that, as part of the supply process in relationship with Treasury Board, the DPRs should actually be ready by June and given to Parliament. Within range, i

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chairman, I beg your indulgence, I'm not trying to avoid answering the question. As I said--

Information & Ethics committee  Exactly. That's just about what I was going to do. I just wanted to preface that it wasn't in answer avoidance. As I said earlier, and it was confirmed by the deputy commissioner, we are prohibited by the statute to comment on any details of an investigation, even after the inves

Information & Ethics committee  That's correct.

Information & Ethics committee  The reason the number is going down this year is that we were given, in the previous year, a one-time funding to cover some IT security and office one-time-cost set-up, as well as some professional service money that was attached to the information technology project.

Information & Ethics committee  The statement was accurate. We have obtained, through the usual applications to Public Works, space on the seventh floor in the same building in order to house all of the new recruits. We did hire five special backlog investigators last year. That's all we could house, and now th

Information & Ethics committee  We've made some progress. Because of the five new recruits, we're down almost 250--I think 241 is the figure--of catch-up backlog cases. You were also told last year that the investigative workload for one investigator is approximately 45 investigations per year, so if you multip

Information & Ethics committee  We still don't have a handle on what the impact is going to be of five foundations, the officers of Parliament and some 150--yes, that's us, officers of Parliament--extra crown corporations and subsidiaries. It's very hard to know where that will go. We've been given numbers by