Information & Ethics committee  It might have been eight or nine.

Information & Ethics committee  I can't think it would be more than that.

Information & Ethics committee  And it's not fair to me if you don't allow me to answer the question, because in fact I'm happy that you've asked it. Why was such a high number of requests submitted? It's because we're good at it and we know how the system works.

Information & Ethics committee  When we submit requests.... An uninformed and inexperienced requester would submit a request and say, “I want everything that corporation X has published in 2007”. I tell you what, his request probably addresses 20,000 documents, and it probably costs $10,000 worth of search fees

Information & Ethics committee  Good morning.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll give—this may be a surprise to Mr. Angus—a very generous answer to your questions. It might, because the very records that you are asking.... No institution has the duty to create a record in response to an access request, so the records they have may contain hybrid inform

Information & Ethics committee  The answer is absolutely. CBC is now subject to the act for one overriding reason: they get a billion bucks from the Canadian taxpayers. If they did not, they would not be subject to the act. The legislators—you—have put the CBC under the act from September 1, 2007. That's it.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely.

Information & Ethics committee  Unfortunately, the law as drafted in Canada and the U.K. and Australia—they have almost the same wording—has left it to the court to decide what is journalism and what is programming, and in the U.K. what is art and what is literature. This hasn't been done yet. But as a reasona

Information & Ethics committee  The answer is no.

Information & Ethics committee  That I know....

Information & Ethics committee  Check.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, to suggest that the legislature back in 1982.... And I purposely reflected upon the fact that both the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the access right, which is a quasi-constitutional right, were passed within the same session of Parliament and have been in existence si

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know whether you'd say hypocrisy, but it's bifocal. Yes, they have this expertise within, just as most news organizations, from CBC to CTV to Global to Sun Media, all have research departments. Many political parties have them too, and many large corporations have them. B

Information & Ethics committee  But the act has been interpreted so many times by the court. In one of the many judgments, the court says that embarrassment is not an exemption.