Information & Ethics Committee on Nov. 6th, 2006

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Part III, correct. I noted, and this is under a section called “Other Items of Interest”...I think it starts on page 16 and runs over to page 17, and I'll quote:

The panel agreed that increased resources were needed

They're talking about the panel decision now in November of 2005.

for the processing of complaints, for the investigation

--etc.

Indeed, the Panel recommended the revision upwards of certain amounts recommended by the Secretariat.

It therefore came as an unpleasant shock to learn that outgoing Liberal Treasury Board ministers had denied any funding for fiscal year 2005-2006, for those same items that the Panel had unanimously agreed ought to receive additional funding for fiscal years 2006-2007 and 2007-2008.

Could you comment on that particular statement? What we've talked about is that the panel decision has effectively been upheld in the current fiscal year. There seems to be a diversion or a disconnect between the decision of the Treasury Board at that time and the panel. Do you have any comment to add to that?

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

Just to explain, when we started the panel process for the first time--it would have been in mid-year of 2005-06--we were having tremendous fiscal pressures in the Office of the Information Commissioner, and we were consulting regularly with the Treasury Board to determine whether the board would be willing to give us, by way of supplementaries for 2005-06, an additional $400,000, which related to items that we were asking the panel for--apparently for the backlog.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Primarily, yes.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

We wanted to get a jump-start on it, and we thought we had a pretty good understanding with the Treasury Board that we would be given the funds to get a jump-start on 2005-06. In fact, I think it was at the last Treasury Board meeting before the election that the Treasury Board staff came with the proposal from the Information Commissioner for supplementaries for 2005-06, and the board denied it.

We were at such a late period in the fiscal year that we really had to cut out a lot of the activities and initiatives we had entrained in order to make up the $400,000. That is the frustration that's being expressed in that paragraph.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

So, really, you were delayed further. So as of April 1, under the new report that was tabled, were those funds then available?

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

Yes, they were.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

You could then start the process of clearing up this backlog and so on.

If I could have a bit more time, Mr. Chair, there's one other item here that I'm curious about, and it relates somewhat to Mr. Wallace's question. I'm looking at your bar graph in table 1--it's on page 8, in the same report. It sets out the number of inquiries that are pending, received, completed, and under investigation. It shows a significant increase in the number of inquiries that are completed, but at the same time, the number pending from the previous year also went up.

I'm thinking that if the expectation was that in 2006-07 you'd have your funding in place now and you could start clearing up this backlog, that you were going to complete more cases in this 2006-07 fiscal year compared to the previous year.... The number pending actually didn't drop.

Do you see what I mean here?

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

There are a couple of things when you're dealing with a backlog process. If you turn all your attention to the backlog, then everything that's coming in the door is quickly being added to the backlog. So you could work away at backlogs, but.... You have to get enough human resources in place to have almost two teams. One keeps the ones coming in the door from getting into a backlog and another team works at getting the ones in the backlog. Because of our accommodation issues and because of just not getting those extra bodies in place, we're grinding away at them. We're getting as many out as we can, but we just keep adding to the backlog as new ones come in the door.

So until we get bodies in chairs, our success is just not going to show up in the figures.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Monsieur Roy.

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to know how many requests, not complaints, you receive every year.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

I think it's about 29,000.

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

You receive 29,000 requests. You said one in every ten gives rise to a complaint. So you would have--

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

I could give you the full workload figure that appears in our annual report for last year.

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Yes, please.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

The full workload figure was 2,700 complaints.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

So 2,700, not 27,000.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

Right, 2,700.

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Since one request in ten gives rise to a complaint, you therefore receive approximately 27,000 requests for access to information. If you divide your $8,181,000 budget by 27,000, you get the cost of dealing with one request or one complaint.

If the number of requests increased by 10%, for example, you would be able to calculate the cost of processing a request based on the increase. Do you understand? It is possible to make such a calculation.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

It certainly is a way to forecast additional resources, but not quite as sophisticated as the Treasury Board would require, I don't think. But it's one that we'll use, if it looks good.

Basically, we see that an investigator can handle effectively approximately 45 complaints a year, with the hundreds of thousands of pages to review in files, and so forth. That's a figure we've discussed with other investigative agencies and with the Treasury Board, and that's a general standard that we follow in asking for resources. So we take our number of complaints and divide by 45, and that is the number of bodies we need.

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

So, it's 2,700 complaints divided by 45.

How many investigators do you presently have?

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

Of actual investigators, we have 29, and we're waiting to put 16 in chairs.

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

This means that you're presently far from meeting the demand, as you mentioned earlier. What kind of a backlog do you have? Does the backlog create additional work? When the processing of a complaint is late, the plaintiff must surely try to contact you many times, which is really very time-consuming.

I've already been an ombudsman for health services. While I was answering ten phone calls because I didn't have enough time to deal with a given complaint, there was nothing else I could do.

I understand this is the problem you are presently facing.

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

As we answer backlogged, old complaints, as we finish those investigations, those are on average taking us 18 months. If we take all the old ones out and just look at what's coming in the door, those are on average taking us 4.8 months. So you can see that if we took out the old cases, we can turn them around in four months, but until we get the old cases out of the way, we're going to have overall turnaround times in excess of a year.

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Access to information dates back to 1983. Was the 10% yearly increase very steady? Was it higher in some years?

[J. Alan Leadbeater]

It's not constant. The forecasting of complaints in the door is something we have to look at over a long period of time. Some years, we have not had the increase we expected, but if you look at it over a ten-year period of time, yes, it will have averaged approximately 10%.