Information & Ethics Committee on June 19th, 2007

[Leonard Edwards]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

It's very dangerous to ask a deputy minister if he needs more staff.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

I know, I know.

We've had testimony—and our chairman has a mind like a steel trap; he'll probably remember who it was. There was a program involving ATI people at the universities. I forget who brought that testimony forward—

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

It was the Information Commissioner, in Calgary.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

There he is. I told you, the man is just amazing.

Should we be introducing a degree from our universities that would specifically train ATI people? Should we go one step beyond that? Is that part of the problem—that you need to train these people, and we have some...?

[Leonard Edwards]

I think you've put your finger on an important aspect of it, which is that we need to create opportunities that make this sort of work interesting enough and attractive enough for people to want to go into it. That means providing incentives in terms of training and so forth that are quick off the mark. I hate to cast a pall over the whole proceeding in a way, but the fact is that we need ATI people, access to information people. We need accountants. We need financial people. The job market these days is extremely difficult for all aspects of the public service, not just this particular area; it's a broader issue than simply here, but to the extent that we can, what we should be doing is making these jobs attractive, with good pay and good job security and good training as they need it.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

For the last part of my question, I really think it's necessary that we remove this cloud of doubt. I think the proceedings have produced that, to the effect that, possibly, some of the ATI people....

I guess I want to ask this. In the ATI circles, when ATI people are taken before committee, dragged before committees and really grilled, how does this get out to other staff? Would it actually slow down ATI requests as a result? Would it put a fear into your people? Is it working counter-productively?

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't be investigating. When there's wrongdoing, we need to get to the bottom of that. But in a particular case like this, what's happening within the ATI? Would people who might possibly be interested in that career look at this and say, “Forget that, I don't need to have this kind of...”?

[Leonard Edwards]

You ask a pretty tough question. Those of us who work in the public service do so because we're motivated by public service. Right? It's not because we're afraid of being criticized. It's not because we don't look forward to moments such as this, when we get senior positions, to meet face to face with parliamentarians. Not at all.

I do worry that there is sometimes a fear of failure, a fear of taking risk and so on. But what I say to my staff is, “Look, you're not perfect. No one is perfect. You will make mistakes from time to time. The system is tolerant of those mistakes that are made from time to time. You learn from the mistakes and you move on.” And as we were discussing with the chair, there's probably one area that could have been handled a little bit better. Next time it will be handled better.

We are not dealing with incompetent people here. In fact, I would bristle at any suggestion that my people are incompetent. They're far from incompetent. They are very competent people. But yes, sometimes things don't go quite as well as we all hoped. We fix it, get it behind us, and go forward.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Thank you, sir.

Again, I want to thank you for coming before the committee and for doing such a good job representing your staff.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Thank you, Mr. Van Kesteren.

We have Madame Lavallée next.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Edwards, did you in fact state that were appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade three months ago?

[Leonard Edwards]

Yes, I have been in this job for three months.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

So then, you were appointed on March 19, or thereabouts. According to the chronology of events, the initial access to information requests were made on January 29, that is one and a half months before you took over your new duties. Is that correct?

You said that you were the best person to answer questions. There is something I do not understand, but it is only a minor point, nothing serious. DFAIT received the report on January 17. I learned this fact from a Justice Department document which states that officials submitted this report to the department on January 17, 2006.

The Globe and Mail reported in its April 26 edition that the following portions of paragraph 14 had been censored. I will read what it says to you in English, even though my English is not that good.

Military intelligence and police forces have been accused of involvement in arbitrary arrest, kidnapping, extortion, torture and extra judicial killing of criminal suspects.

Mr. Deputy Minister, unless you are denying that this is actually in the report...This was published one and a half months ago, and so far, no one has denied that this is in fact what the report says. Had the facts reported been false, I am certain the minister himself would have gladly issued a press release saying that the Globe and Mail report was inaccurate.

That said, since no one has denied the Globe and Mail report, I have to believe that it is the truth. My intelligence and my logical mind lead me to believe that is the case.

DFAIT received a report on January 17 describing instances of kidnappings, extortion, torture and summary executions. By your account, someone then shelved this report. I believe what you are saying. You claim that neither you nor the minister saw the report. I also believe you are telling the truth about this.

What guidelines are being followed? You are the new deputy minister. You approve and review guidelines. Which guidelines were mainly followed and which will be followed in the future in the case of a report such as this, which violates the Geneva Convention? Earlier, I forgot about the International Convention Against Torture. An eminent professor from the University of British Columbia, Mr. Byers, even said that with this report, Canada demonstrated that it was guilty of war crimes. That is no small thing! Yet, no one from DFAIT called the then deputy minister or contacted the minister's office. Are you telling us that no one took it upon himself to do that?

[Leonard Edwards]

Mr. Chairman, again, we seem to be moving, with all respect to the member, well beyond the discussion of ATIP requests and into the functioning of the department and the providing of advice to the minister.

First of all, to go to your point about confirming or denying, I can neither confirm nor deny what's in that report for the reasons the chair has already explained and I explained in my letter. I'm prepared to appear before the committee and discuss the issues that have to do with ATIP, but the question I've been asked has a lot more to do with what kind of advice I provided to the minister and when it was provided to the minister, based on this report, which I cannot discuss.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Could you stop the clock, please?

Mr. Edwards, I think this is a perfect example. Members of Parliament, of course, do not work in the public service. They have no way of knowing, really, by way of experience, how a department works, what a chain of command is, what kind of information goes to whom and when. I think the question here is one of frustration, of trying to understand the process of how information flows. So let's take the minister out of it for the moment, because I think we can all agree that what advice is provided to the minister, well, that's advice for the minister.

But I think Madame Lavallée was also inquiring about what information flows to you so that you are aware of what's happening in your department. And of course floating around in all of this is the word “torture” and the allegations of torture, and we have the difficulty of a report apparently being leaked in a non-redacted form. No one, of course, can confirm or deny whether that's the report in its non-redacted form without, of course, commenting on the report. Nonetheless, as Madame Lavallée pointed out, it's in the paper, it hasn't been denied, so there's an air of credibility, an air of believability about it, that there were reports to us—us being Canadians—about torture of people in Afghanistan who, at one time, were under our control.

On a hypothetical basis, so that we can understand, I think Madame Lavallée was asking, what is the flow of that type of information, and does it get to you?

[Leonard Edwards]

Hypothetically. Mr. Chairman, I want to be helpful. Please don't get me wrong. I'm prepared to take the approach you're suggesting, although it does not seem that we're now talking about the Access to Information Act request and how we dealt with these particular requests we're discussing.

By and large, what happens in the process is that this information comes into the department. It will come, usually, to the director level or below, and it usually comes in the form of telegrams or e-mails and classified and non-classified material. So we collect this information, and at some point someone makes a judgment call that this is worth telling their boss about, and that might be the director general. Then that person will look at it and say they think this is sensitive enough that it needs to go farther up the line.

So it can either be a specific piece of information or it could be something that rolls into a broader analytical piece that they're doing in terms of developing a policy toward a particular country or an issue, and so on.

All along the line judgment calls are made that determine how a piece of information is going to be used. Sometimes it ends up on my desk and doesn't go any further, because I say the minister doesn't need to know this. Sometimes it comes to my desk, and I say they're to do another note to the minister. Sometimes I don't get it at all. An ADM might say it doesn't have to go any further.

That's how the system works. Is it a perfect system? As I said before, no system is perfect. We try to make sure we make the right judgments here and there and everywhere, but sometimes we don't.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Thank you. I think that was the gist of the question. I think you've answered it as well. That's the second time we've heard judgment calls, both on the ATIP side and on the “information moving up the chain” side. Fair enough. We're all human.

I have Mr. Martin, Mr. Dhaliwal, Mr. Pearson, and that's going to be it. I'm not even going to be able to get beyond that. I'll try to get those people in. So let's try to be brief.

Mr. Martin.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be brief.

That overview was helpful, Mr. Edwards, but I just can't get past this point that on some things you make a judgment call that the minister should be made aware of. If your minister were standing in the House of Commons being battered with questions demanding to know the state of detainees in Afghanistan, surely the deputy minister or somebody underneath you would say they'd better make the minister aware of this; he's getting the crap kicked out of him day after day in question period.

Let me summarize what we think went wrong here. When the original requests were made, your office tried its best to deny the existence. Mr. Esau went back. When you say the question was a little too global, too vague, let me tell you, Mr. Esau went back and said, and this is a quote from his e-mail:

If the records do exist but I failed to use the precise title of the reports, please let me know. I'm hearing from other sources that DFAIT does in fact produce human rights reports and I just want to confirm DFAIT's position on this, that human rights reports DO NOT exist and that my request was not interpreted with undue narrowness...

In other words, he did his best to negotiate with the ATIP officer to say that if he didn't use quite the right language, could he please be helped to phrase it in a way that he might use the right language. That was pretty serious. She got back and said she'd do some digging and get back to him. But then she said they felt they'd answered the letter of request.

So he got jerked around two or even three times by not using the magic words. This is where we used the Rumpelstiltskin reference. What does it take, some magic word before the information starts to flow? It's not supposed to be like that. The chairman read Treasury Board guidelines that they're supposed to err on the side of the applicant, not on the side of a minister who's trying to preserve himself from being embarrassed.

Then, when you had to admit these reports do exist, they started to get censored like crazy, in a way they were never censored before. This is what really concerns me.

The only question I have is a specific one. Who directed the censorship of the 2005 report, which was released in 2006, and the 2006 report, which was released in 2007? Who directed the blacking out of all reference to torture in those two documents?

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

[Inaudible--Editor]...question, who directed the blacking out.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

What is that?

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

That's your question.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Why that clarification, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Because we don't know what's in the document about torture.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

All right.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

And you keep repeating it. You may be 100% right, but just so we don't keep repeating the same thing and having the witness repeat the same thing, the question is, who directed the redaction of the documents in the last two years?