Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members.
The work of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics has been one of the few positive changes under Canada's first-generation access legislation. Your committee's efforts have been in contrast to official Ottawa's constant war to deflate the importance of information rights.
The focus of your current deliberations is on whether access users are too widely discussed, tracked, and monitored. I can testify to some of these counterproductive practices, like amber alerting and profiling of access users, adopted by government agencies. These practices create barriers to public access to federal records, and abuse the public's right to know about Ottawa.
I am probably the access user with the longest continual and varied experience, having filed thousands of access requests since October or November 1982. I am drawing from that experience, as well as other experiences with access.
I want to first make it clear that the problem of watching over access users and interfering with access as a quick, equal, and non-manipulative public access means to federal records is not a new one. I've given the committee various articles to that effect. Also, counterproductive practices are not just the result of a few isolated incidents, as in a handful of bad guys. This goes contrary to the position expressed by government witnesses you've heard.
Few officials will want to elaborate on the real problems. They've been trained to only answer as little as possible, very slowly--something like the treatment my access requests normally receive. That does not mean many are not trying, under difficult circumstances perhaps too timid in fashion, to help access users.
My experience is that who is applying contributes to the type of reply received and the length of time it takes. My access applications, for instance, are usually recognized, and can be met with uneven and at times unequal treatment depending on the agency and the officials. I'm pegged by different agencies in different fashions as an individual applicant, as media, as business, as researcher--you name it. So having officials keep my identity secure or treat my applications fairly is important, but not always done. That has implications on how information sought is treated.
Two inside tracking systems help to watch users like me. One managerial coordination system, coordination of access to information requests, or CAIR, has been around since 1989. In a 1989 Toronto Star interview I questioned the wisdom and purpose of the CAIR tracking system in its matches and the central agency's use of it, and it still goes on.
I've also questioned the need for other early warning systems that give communication and political operatives a chance to intervene in information releases. One particularly insidious system that's been around for some time goes by different names such as amber light, red alert, or red file process. It channels some of my many requests and other users' requests as “sensitive”, “interesting”, in separate streams, all in need of watching.
Discussion is not usually recorded, or at least not in full, where such access requests involve access and communications people, even ADMs, DMs, and ministers' office representatives. It amounts to both an early warning surveillance system and a communication damage control vehicle, and it contributes to delaying access and subverting the public's right to know.
Countless times I've been told by officials that the data requested is further delayed by a week or two or more, having been dropped off at the communication shop, or is being reviewed by this or that exempt political staffer in the minister's office. This can be quantified to a point through access tracking logs--they don't record everything. Academics like Alasdair Roberts have referred to it, and citizens groups like the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, which you will be hearing from, have documented the access problems such inside tracking systems bring. I'm not statistics; I'm the flesh here.
Given recently an actual internal amber alert memo for the first time...brings this questionable ongoing tracking system into further disrepute. That particular June 2006 amber alert was written about in The Gazette and The Hill Times. It was generated by one of my requests at Citizenship and Immigration Canada for records on developing integrated Canada-U.S. immigration systems.
Communications people, fed by the access officials, were given a heads-up and a few days' time to review the materials for release to me, and possibly prepared ministerial house cards and media lines. Certain pages of the proposed access release were identified—pages 21, 52, 120, 224, etc.—that might be sensitive or embarrassing or receive unwanted or undue publicity.
One of the officials taking part in the amber alert exercise works in the office of the current Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.