Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and honourable members.
I do have an opening statement that is being distributed to you, as well as some supplementary information we have prepared, given our past appearances before this committee, to try to clarify some rather complex budgetary points for the honourable members.
Mr. Chairman, with your permission, I won't read my opening statement; all the honourable members do have a copy in both official languages. I'd just like to highlight some points in it and perhaps give the honourable members more time for questions on budgetary issues that interest them.
First of all, I'd like to thank the committee for the report they brought down on PIPEDA yesterday afternoon. It looks like an excellent report, and I see that many of the recommendations we made to this committee have been retained. I thank you for your interest in such practical matters as employment, information rights, due diligence, international cooperation, and so on. However, given that I was out of the office on communication responsibilities yesterday, I haven't had the chance to read it. Also, I will reserve any comments for later.
Once again, thank you for your work on what I know is a very complex topic.
I am here today with regard to the Main Estimates. I first want to say that our top priority continues to be tackling our complaints backlog. Mr. Watson is here with me to answer your questions in this regard, should you have any. We are also putting increased emphasis on education and prevention, as well as leaks and gaps with regard to protecting confidential information.
We are now in the second year of the two-year implementation schedule for our office's comprehensive business plan, and that's why you see we're now in the second set of bars in that graph we have done to illustrate the evolution of our budgetary status.
I'd just like to remind the honourable members of how the environment in which we work is constantly changing because of the technological backdrop to all the work we do, and this accounts for a large part of our work. International data flows have caused us to give increased attention to the issue of international cooperation, and I can mention GPS, biometrics, RFIDs, ongoing security questions--think of the do-not-fly list--the Anti-terrorist Act, and so on.
Our budget is underpinning five strategic priorities we have outlined in the material put before you. I'll just remind you of them. There's improving and expanding our service delivery, that is, answering complaints and requests for information and responding to the communication needs of Canadians and Canadian organizations. There's engaging with you on privacy issues, and I must say I'm very happy to be appearing before you, I think next Tuesday, on the issue of identity theft. I am really happy that you have taken up that issue, and we're busy putting together a presentation for you on Tuesday.
Then there's Privacy Act reform and PIPEDA reform, which you've just dealt with. I understand you may be looking at Privacy Act reform in the fall again, and I really welcome that. We'd be very happy to do whatever would be appropriate and useful for this committee in your study of the Privacy Act.
We are hosting the 29th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Montreal in late September. This is a huge international conference. We expect some five hundred people, and it is a kind of convergence of many privacy players throughout the world. There'll be a whole week of meetings on privacy, including on privacy in various provinces, hosted by provincial commissioners. That is clearly our primary focus from here until the end of September.
We're continuing to build our organizational capacity in terms of staffing, training, and structuring our office. Overall, we're trying to become more and more proactive and less complaint-driven, that is, less passive--by waiting for problems to come to us--but rather going out and trying to find privacy problems and bring a solution to them as they occur.
If you are interested, Mr. Watson can give you more specific figures on our complaints backlog. In any case, I want to draw the attention of committee members to the fact that we have ourcut complaint backlog by approximately 50% over the past year. We are very proud of our efforts, and we hope to be able to eliminate this backlog completely by the end of the current fiscal year.
We will of course use many means, including new technology and new procedures, in streamlining the complaint system.
In keeping with our wish to become more proactive and more preventive in our approach, we're increasing the number of audits, and we were funded to support an expanded audit capacity. I think we're doubling the number of audits we're doing in the public and private sectors. You will also remember that we have a new audit responsibility for FINTRAC, our national money laundering agency, and by legislation we audit FINTRAC every two years.
This committee has been particularly concerned about--and I understand has given me directions to enhance--public education, communication, and outreach to Canadians and companies. So I'm happy to say that we have completed an interactive e-learning tool for retailers in conjunction with the Retail Council of Canada and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. We have a PIPEDA-101 DVD, we're looking at drafting breach notification guidelines, and of course we'll take into account the direction you've given us in your report.
Several other of the priorities for this year include continuing to dialogue with this committee or other committees of Parliament in order to work on fundamental reforms to the Privacy Act. I remind you that the Privacy Act has standards that are far below what we now expect of the public sector, and we'll talk a bit more about this in the fall.
That, Mr. Chairman, is an overview of our priorities, and the budget we hope you will vote for us is in support of those priorities. I'd be very happy to answer any questions on our work or any of our particular projects or our past expenditures.
