Information & Ethics Committee on Nov. 6th, 2006

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.

The orders of the day are that pursuant to Standing Order 81(4), we consider main estimates 2006-07, vote 40, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada, under Justice, referred to the committee on Tuesday, April 25, 2006.

We have before us today the officers of the Information Commissioner of Canada: the deputy information commissioner, Mr. Leadbeater; the director general of investigations and reviews, Monsieur Dupuis; the director general of corporate services, Ms. McEwan; and the director of financial services, Mr. Campbell. Good afternoon to you all.

Members should have all the documentation before us in both official languages.

Mr. Leadbeater, you've appeared many times before this committee. As you know, we normally allow up to ten minutes for a presentation and then each caucus will have up to seven minutes for questions and answers.

You may commence. Thank you.

[J. Alan Leadbeater, Deputy Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to discuss with you the 2006-2007 Estimates for the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada. The review of the financial requirements of federal institutions is indeed one of the more important roles that your committee plays in our system of government.

This year, the process is complicated by the fact that seven months have gone by since the beginning of the financial year. Some of us, including the Privacy Commissioner and the Information Commissioner, are going to refer to another parliamentary committee which has already reviewed our 2006-2007 resource requirements.

The resources identified in the estimates documents before you total, for the Information Commissioner's office, $8,181,000, which includes $993,000 for employee benefits plans.

I'll just refer you to tab 2 of the tabbed document I've handed out. I've just extracted one page from part II of the estimates, and you'll see that's the total for the Offices of the Information and Privacy Commissioners of Canada. The penultimate line, where you see $8,181,000 under “Operating” and the $5,556,000 for last year is the line for the Office of the Information Commissioner. That is in fact vote 40, Office of the Information Commissioner. So 33% of the overall request is for the Office of the Information Commissioner and 67% is for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. I understand she will be speaking to her portion on Wednesday.

This primary increase of $2,814,000 represents a 47% increase over the previous year's budget for the Office of the Information Commissioner, and it was approved by the Treasury Board for presentation to Parliament, this process, as a result of a recommendation made in November 2005 by an all-party parliamentary advisory panel chaired by the Speaker of the House of Commons. I believe you had some discussion of that advisory panel here when Treasury Board officials appeared earlier.

Tab 3 is simply a chart that shows you the changes, from how we got from the 2005-06 main estimates, the top line, which is $5,500,000, to the 2006-07 main estimates, $8,100,000. You'll see that the largest portion of the difference—there was some added in and some taken out—is that advisory panel decision, $2,800,000.

I'd like to open a parenthesis here to speak about this parliamentary advisory panel, even though I know you've had some discussions about it, and I'm going to be brief because of that.

The advisory panel was established as a two-year pilot project by the Martin government in response to recommendations made by this committee, the public accounts committee, and the Senate Standing Committee on National Finance. All three committees determined, after hearing concerns expressed by officers of Parliament, that it was necessary to adopt a process to protect officers of Parliament from the potential for governments to interfere with their independence through the funding process.

The Information Commissioner was one of those who had raised concerns with Parliament for a number of years that governments were not adequately funding his work, resulting in the growth in our office of an unacceptable backlog of incomplete investigations and diminishing the ability of the Information Commissioner to assist Parliament in providing high-quality, timely advice on the effect of proposed legislation. The previous Liberal government responded to those concerns and to the urging of this committee by agreeing to this two-year pilot project during which Treasury Board ministers would give serious weight to a recommendation made by an all-party panel of MPs chaired by the Speaker.

The Information Commissioner and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner were the only two officers of Parliament to go before this panel last year, and as I said previously, that panel recommended the $2.8 million increase for the Office of the Information Commissioner. The Treasury Board minister has accepted the panel's recommendations and they are therefore reflected in this year's estimates.

The uses to which the additional funds will be put are shown at tab 4. That's why I've included tab 4. There are three pages. The first page is the actual operating funds. The second page is the personnel, what we call full-time equivalents, FTEs, and you'll see that 22 additional FTEs were authorized. The third page is simply a roll-up of the two, indicating the reasons for this additional requirement that we had. You'll see those. There are 12 listed in the left-hand column, and we can discuss those more as we proceed. Most, you'll see, relate to workload.

With the additional dollars, we expect that we will have cleared the backlog of our incomplete cases by the end of fiscal year 2008-09, and by 2009-10 we intend to meet overall service standards of four months to complete our most time-consuming types of investigations. Those are refusals to disclose based on secrecy, and we have a service standard of one month to completion of administrative complaints such as delay, unjustified extensions of time, and fees.

Our major impediment to meeting our backlog reduction goals at the moment is not money; we've been given the money, subject to the approval of Parliament and through this committee's work. Right now, it's the securing of an additional combination from Public Works to accommodate 22 additional folks. We are working with Public Works on that at the moment.

I've included tab 5 simply so that you can see not just the change of the $2 million and what we're going to do with it, but the overall budget of the Office of the Information Commissioner—the full $8 million and how it is broken down by standard object of expenditures. Those two documents, the two pages in that tab, show you that 76% of our funds go to salaries; because we're an investigative agency, those are mainly salaries for investigators. The remaining 24% has to do with other operating funds.

We expect that it may be necessary to approach the parliamentary advisory panel again if Bill C-2 is passed, as it would impose new responsibilities on the Office of the Information Commissioner, including processing access to information and privacy requests from the public for the first time, as we are not now covered by either of those statutes; undertaking investigations of complaints against as many as 80 new government institutions, adding to the 150 that are now covered, which means a significant increase; and establishing and responding to a mechanism for handling complaints against the Office of the Information Commissioner by persons dissatisfied with our responses to access requests. Because the state of Bill C-2 is still in flux, we have not completed an assessment of the likely additional resources that would be required for that.

Just to complete the picture, we do intend to seek some additional funds for establishing an internal audit function, consistent with recommendations made by the Comptroller General and the Auditor General, and will do so along with a number of other agencies in an omnibus submission to Treasury Board.

With respect to Bill C-2, just before I leave that, I have also circulated a copy of the Office of the Information Commissioner's assessment of the amendments adopted by the Senate committee with respect to Bill C-2.

Thank you. Those are my comments. I'm available to answer your questions.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Leadbeater.

Mr. Dhaliwal.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am new to this committee. With respect to last year's budget, I would like to know if you met your expectations when it came to the budget and the actual expenses that were uncut.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

I think I have our actual expenditures for 2005-06.

In the 2005-06 main estimates, we had an approved amount of $5.5 million. We actually spent $5.89 million because of supplementaries and adjustments through the year. Some of those included adjustments for collective bargaining agreements; additional funding for a body to help us deal with public service modernization; some severance pay issues; and a carry-forward from last year, because we're entitled to carry forward unspent funds from the previous year. That was our expenditure profile for last year.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

So most of this money was spent on salaries and benefits.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

That's correct. If you look at tab 5, you'll see the breakdown for 2006-07. In percentage terms, it's the same as 2005-06. There is $6,223,000 for salaries and wages. For operating funds, it is $1.9 million. So 24% of the budget is operating funds and 76% is salaries. That general breakdown was true for last year as well.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

What are your expectations for this with Bill C-2 coming into effect? Is it going to be pretty well the same?

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

We expect we will have to make a request for additional funds, should Bill C-2 come in. As I said in my opening remarks, until we know the precise terms of Bill C-2--what institutions are covered--we won't be able to finalize our estimate of the additional funds we will need. This particular request does not include resources for Bill C-2.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, panel, for coming and talking to us.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Monsieur Laforest.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

Good afternoon and welcome to the committee.

The advisory panel referred to by the Office of the Information Commissioner in coming up with its budget is not a standing committee. It's an ad hoc panel to ensure the independence of officers of Parliament from government.

Is this panel fulfilling its mandate? Doesn't its ad hoc nature still make it dependent to some degree?

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

We certainly welcome this committee. It's been a major step forward for all officers of Parliament. As you can see from our experience last year, for the first time we were on a proper financial footing. We were given an increase of almost 47% in our budget. That being said, the major issue for officers of Parliament is when governments of the day, especially majority governments, have issues with officers of Parliament, how they can be insulated from having that impact on their budgets.

There is one feature of the new ad hoc panel that is troubling to the Office of the Information Commissioner and some other officers of Parliament, and that is that it operates in camera. While that worked very well with a minority government situation, as it was last year, in a majority government situation, with an ad hoc panel, the only protection for officers of Parliament is their public. That's the beauty, of course, of committees like this: they operate largely in public in dealing with resource requests.

So with that caveat, and also some issues around the timing of when the committee meets, which is mainly administrative, we certainly consider it a positive development.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

You have no control over the influx of requests, both access to information and complaints. According to a document I read, one in every ten access requests gives rise to a complaint. This is an actual statistic.

If, for whatever reason, the number of requests increased appreciably, say by 25 or 40%, you would once more be faced with a backlog. Do you have any control over this?

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

You're absolutely correct. We can't predict or control what comes in the door, and we have a mandatory obligation to investigate every complaint. We have no discretion not to investigate.

We have a pretty good track record of forecasting. Although it doesn't look like perfect forecasting from one year to the next, the forecasting over a fairly extended period of time goes up in the same percentage as general requests come to government. Requests coming to government are increasing over time on the order of approximately 10% per year.

[Jean-Yves Laforest, Bloc, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Martin.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, witnesses. Welcome.

I'm most interested, Mr. Leadbeater, in some of the remarks you've made regarding Bill C-2. I know the implementation will have a direct bearing on your budget, so I think my remarks and questions will be in order.

I'm most interested in what you have under “Negative Changes” on page 6 of the document you circulated with your budgetary documents.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

The Senate documents?

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Yes, page 6 of the document that's reacting to the Senate's amendments to Bill C-2.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Thank you.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

You deal specifically with the public interest override, which is one of the Senate amendments that gave us some consternation as well. I think it's useful for us to examine this.

The Senate is calling for the public interest to override. They talk about a mandatory exemption for any information that relates to national security, which is actually a more broad and sweeping exemption than is in the existing bill. I note that in the amendment the NDP put forward during the study of Bill C-2, we called for a public interest override, but it would be at the discretion of the Information Commissioner.

I'd ask you to comment on this a little bit for the benefit of the committee. Will this affect the section 15 exemption in the current ATIA and have an impact on the administration of the bill? I'm talking about Senate amendment 118, just for the record.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

It's not a very long section. Maybe I'll just read what this proposed public interest override section says, as amended by the Senate. It says:

Despite any other provision of this Act,

—that being the Access to Information Act—

the head of a government institution may disclose all or part of a record to which this Act applies if the head determines that the public interest in the disclosure clearly outweighs in importance any loss, prejudice or harm that may result from the disclosure. However, the head shall not disclose any information that relates to national security.

That's a—

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

It leaves it up to the head of the institution, first of all, or the department.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

It leaves it up to the head to decide whether or not the public interest does outweigh the need for secrecy. It also makes it mandatory for the head to refuse disclosure of any information that relates to national security.

That phrase “relates to” is pretty broad. I don't know if any of you have read in the newspaper today that an interesting book, just published, disclosed for the first time plans the government had in the Cold War period to take dissidents into camps—