As a result of work done by the previous President of the Treasury Board, Mr. Alcock, an ad hoc committee of members was struck to look at the financial requirements of the Information Commissioner and other parliamentary officers. For the first time, we were able to see the top secret documents from Treasury Board that did the analysis of our spending and what our requirements were.
As a result of that, the Treasury Board offered to give us 90% of what we had asked for, which they could justify. After testimony, the ad hoc committee provided us with about another $300,000 for additional staff to deal with the backlog. Subsequently, just before the last election, the Treasury Board ministers met and approved that recommendation, so those are our budget figures for this year.
However, we had gone to Treasury Board and said it's very difficult to hire in the public service environment, and it's very hard to get space and we'll need more space. As soon as the parliamentary committee reports and lets us know what they've decided to do, can we begin the process of hiring and looking for space? Treasury Board said yes.
Unfortunately, three months after we had started the process, Treasury Board said no. We basically had to close down the office, because we had to find $450,000 in two months or we would have spent more than we were allowed to do under the act. Basically we went through an enormous amount of stress in the office because of that decision by the Treasury Board.
But overall, the new process worked very well from our point of view. We would like to see it an open process, because right now it has been a closed process. We'd like to see it opened up so that there would be a proper transcript and a proper ability for people to come in and see. In the annual report, there's a description of how we made out and how it worked.