Information & Ethics Committee on June 19th, 2006

[John Reid]

I should make a point that it is a rule in our office that we do not speak off the record. The reason for that is there are only three of us who speak to the press. We are an extraordinarily small office. It would be stupid for us to try to speak off the record when everybody knows that we're such a small office.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Are you satisfied that this rule was observed in this instance?

[John Reid]

It was. Mr. Leadbeater has admitted that he spoke to the journalists. He has told you what he said. And I might say that before we were getting many calls from members of Parliament, and particularly from journalists, and we agreed that he could refer them to the open government act.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Commissioner, on April 28, did you have a discussion with Mr. Chris Froggatt, chief of staff to the President of Treasury Board regarding this apparent leak?

[John Reid]

I don't recall the date, but I do recall that he raised the question with me.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Mr. Froggatt advises me that you told him that Mr. Leadbeater leaked contents of the report in this article. Do you deny that now?

[John Reid]

I did not use the word “leak”. Mr. Froggatt used the word “leak”.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

What words did you use in your conversation?

[John Reid]

I said we had been talking to journalists and that Mr. Leadbeater had been the one assigned to talk to the English journalists and Mr. Dupuis had been assigned to talk to the French journalists.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Have you taken any disciplinary action against Mr. Leadbeater for this information having...? If there's no other person in your office, if he's the only one talking to English journalists, then who else could it possibly have come from?

[John Reid]

There was no leak, Mr. Chairman.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

It might have come from the PMO.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Oh yes, we were criticizing ourselves. Very good, Wayne. Nice one.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Mr. Easter.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We had a discussion with the minister earlier, prior to your being here. Mr. Dhaliwal also asked a question of the government on the cost—and you've responded to it slightly—and it would be $120 million more, according to the minister. Mr. Leadbeater indicated that you as the Information Commissioner had no idea where that $120 million came from. My question to you is, were you consulted by the government as they did these calculations on costs about what the potential changes would in fact cost? Were you consulted on that?

[John Reid]

Mr. Chairman, in early March I went to see Minister Baird to give him a copy of the open government act and to offer our assistance and help in the drafting of the Federal Accountability Act. At the same time, Mr. Leadbeater met with the deputy minister of Justice and offered him the same opportunity and services from our office. Neither the Department of Justice nor anybody in Treasury Board talked to us at all. The first time we saw anything about access to information was when Bill C-2 was eventually published by the government.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Then I really do, Mr. Chair, have to question the minister's figures. There are a number of ways of preventing legislation from coming forward, and certainly I was shocked by the figure of $120 million that the minister raised. The cost itself can certainly be a deterrent, affecting whether or not one would support bringing forward legislation.

I would ask you, seeing that the Information Commissioner and his office were not really consulted on matters related to cost, whether you or at least the clerk from this committee could get back to the minister to ask for further clarification on this. If the minister is twice as high as he ought to be on those figures, we should know it, because cost is a factor.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

I'll ask the clerk to contact the minister's office to ask the minister to provide us with documentation available to back the figures he had, which he said were speculative, though he at least offered those figures.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you.

Still sticking with the issue of cost—and actually, I agreed when the minister was here with some of the minister's concerns about access to information, based on my previous experiences, and especially as regards security matters and information coming from other countries—I have a real concern in the cost area about the smaller aspects of access to information; that is, that cost is a prohibiting factor for ordinary citizens, and even MPs' offices sometimes, preventing them from gaining the information through access to information.

Does your office do any analysis of either better ways of accessing the information that are less costly...? The example I'm using is that we required some information on a case through the CFIA, and it was going to cost us $1,600 just to get that information. This was just to try to make an argument that there are better ways of doing inspections of security than was currently the case. That $1,600 is a prohibitive factor for our continuing that access request. How can ordinary citizens or MPs deal with that question, and do you see it as a problem?

[John Reid]

The cost for an application under access is $5. It entitles you to five free hours of search time. After that, the government is entitled to charge you $20 an hour for search time—

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Plus 20¢ a page, I think.

[John Reid]

Then, once the information has been gathered, you have a number of choices. You can see the documentation at a government reading room and determine what it is you want and have that documentation provided to you at about 20¢ a page, or you can arrange to have it sent to you electronically on a CD-ROM. Those are the two options you have.

One of the things we try to do is encourage departments to work with people to limit and zero in on what it is they really want, as opposed to what they may have asked. Individuals, not necessarily being well aware of the complexity of government filing systems, often ask for far more than they really want. We try to narrow it down that way.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

That's it, Mr. Easter. Thank you.

Mr. Tilson, go ahead, please.

[David Tilson, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'd just like to echo Mr. Martin's comments, Mr. Reid, for you and Mr. Leadbeater's work with respect to the open government bill. I still carry your brief with me. My congratulations to you and Mr. Leadbeater and others who have worked on that. It's certainly been helpful to the committee.

However, since you did this, and since Gomery, and since Bill C-2, and since Law Clerk Walsh's coming to the Bill C-2 committee, and since Minister Toews' April document of proposals commenting on the bill, my suspicion is that other consultations with other institutions inside the government and outside the government might be affected by the open government act.

If this committee were to review your bill, perhaps with public hearings--for anybody, I suppose--would it be necessary for you and your staff to go back and revise your thoughts with respect to the open government legislation?

[John Reid]

I think we would have to go back and look at it from the point of view of the amendments that were produced by Bill C-2, because that does involve changes to what we had proposed. We would probably like to go back and take a look at the criticisms that have been filed by the government, and to see whether or not changes had to be made in terms of what we had proposed. We would do that.

We would also like to find a way to be able to give you a clean copy, as it were, probably in the fall. We would undertake that as a separate project.

A lot of that work actually has been done to some extent in the special report as well. We did go into some detail regarding some of those criticisms.

One of the things that we were able to do was to look at the information flows on a variety of institutions. For example, there's not one institution coming into the act under Bill C-2 that doesn't have an analogue that's already in the system. For example, the National Arts Centre has an analogue in the National Gallery. We have a whole range of crown corporations that have marketing plans, all that sort of stuff that has to be kept confidential. So we were pretty confident when we made the proposals for the crown corporations that we had captured the information flows that had to be kept secret for those organizations that were dealing in the commercial world. We worked very hard to ensure that was done.

If we undertake to bring you a clean copy, we would undertake to re-examine those information flows to make sure they are properly looked after.