Information & Ethics committee  Some of the discussion about liability brought some memories back to me. Part of my job is to adjudicate access to information appeals. The government agencies come to me and say they can't release that information for such and such a reason. I've probably heard and read it all.

Information & Ethics committee  I think Monsieur Michaud said exactly what I was thinking, which is that the principles are the same. I know you've heard that Canada wouldn't be the first national jurisdiction to go down this road. There are already some road maps out there—particularly in Great Britain and the

Information & Ethics committee  I think you raise an interesting point about potential cost savings under the formal access system. I can give you an example. I know that the City of Toronto, between 2008 and 2009, cut their formal FOI requests by more than half, and they had been at one point the largest recip

Information & Ethics committee  The example I gave was the City of Toronto, and they did experience a 50% reduction in the number of requests. The comment I would make is that the resources that organizations have to commit to access to information, to the formal request process, while most of them may have sta

Information & Ethics committee  I agree with your first statement. Just from my own observation in Ontario, I believe that municipalities that have gone down this road have done it better. Not every municipality in Ontario, obviously, has done what the cities of Ottawa or Toronto or Vancouver have done; there i

Information & Ethics committee  When it comes to addressing access and privacy issues, in many ways they're different sides of the same coin. What we've said on the privacy side is that as governments are establishing programs that may collect or use citizens' personal information, even at the very conceptual

Information & Ethics committee  Maybe I'll start with the last question first. There were a number of steps that were taken to increase that response rate. I think the key was to bring it to the attention of senior government officials and ministers that their response rate was unacceptable. So we did a number

Information & Ethics committee  Maybe I could also comment. We're lucky. At our office we have both the provincial and municipal levels, so we have a little flavour of both. I think at the provincial level in Ontario there has been an admirable attempt and a lot of effort made to strengthen the formal process.

Information & Ethics committee  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to start by thanking the standing committee for the opportunity to appear here today and take part in your deliberations on open government. I'm here to represent my boss, the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann C