What the Access to Information Act says is that the government is lawfully able to withhold information, but that such exemptions must be “limited and specific”. In other words, the law does not contemplate being able to throw blanket exemptions over certain documents.
Section 25 of the act is what is called the severability principle. That basically means that if there is any portion of a record—and we talk about paper all the time, but it also applies to audiotapes and all the rest of it—that can be released without doing the injury test that would allow you to withhold it, that must be released.
The law affords a right of access. That's the first section of the act. The fundamental import of the act is to make that access affordable. Anything that restricts it has to be very specific, and for very good reason.
There are also time limits there. In other words, something that is secret and withholdable today might not be in a week's time. It has to be revisited every time.
There is one thing that I'm going to be very interested in. I'm going to get a copy of what was released to the professor, because that's the redacted version of it. Apparently the phone call I got from DFAIT yesterday was that my copy has come in. I'm going to be very interested to see if, in light of some of the controversy, they've changed some of it and have reconsidered.
Nobody's perfect. The Information Commissioner will go in and discuss with the people who know what is injurious and what isn't, and will come up with a workable rationale of what should be withheld and what shouldn't be. We can't take the human element out of it, but the specificity is absolutely fundamental to the right of access.
That's my shot at it.