Mr. Chairman, good morning. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
I am appearing before you today on your study of the access to information requests for the department's internal report entitled “Afghanistan 2006: Good Governance, Democratic Development and Human Rights”.
I am accompanied by a number of officials from the department who were more directly involved in the subject of your study. They will be meeting with the committee at a later stage this morning to provide you with more details.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs is responsible and accountable to Parliament for all aspects of the department. As deputy minister, I have delegated responsibility for public servants in the department and I am accountable to the minister for their work.
The minister has asked that my officials and I cooperate fully in providing the factual information to the committee that you are requesting and in answering your questions fully and frankly, consistent with our responsibilities not to disclose confidential information and guided by the Access to Information Act, the Privacy Act, and our oath as public servants.
I am here to set the general context for the department's work in the areas of human rights and Access to Information, and, as befits a deputy minister, to offer the departmental officials also appearing today my support for the work they are doing in the public service of Canada and to demonstrate my full confidence in their ability to carry out their responsibilities.
I would like to stress at the outset, Mr. Chairman, that I have the highest respect for the committees of Parliament and the work they do, including this committee. As a public servant and a deputy minister for many years, I have had many opportunities to appear before parliamentary committees and to work closely with parliamentarians inside and outside the House, and I have always valued the principles of openness, transparency, and cooperation that have characterized these relations and the relations generally between the public service and Parliament.
With respect to the department's work in the area of human rights, let me say a few words about the human rights reports that have been the object of so much attention of late, both in the media and in this and other committees of the House. Like many other countries with a strong tradition of promoting human rights, Canada has, through its Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, developed a practice of preparing various annual human rights reports on specific countries. These reports are internal working documents of the department that are used in the preparation, as needed, of policy advice to the minister on specific human rights issues or on Canada's relations with individual countries or in developing the instructions for Canadian delegations to various international fora, such as the Third Committee of the United Nations or the Human Rights Council, particularly before voting on resolutions.
The reports themselves are prepared by the staff at the Canadian mission in those countries for which a human rights report has been requested by headquarters. They are the assessment of that mission. They are expected to be full and frank in their content and, reporting as clearly as possible the observations of these staff members on information gleaned from various sources, they serve the government in the formulation of policy. They are prepared annually, normally towards the end of the calendar year, and forwarded to Ottawa early in the following year.
Last year, the department requested 111 such country-specific reports. Unlike some countries, Canada does not prepare a single global report, nor, given the use to which these reports are put in providing policy advice and instructions to Canadian delegations, are they intended for public release. Ms. Kutz can provide you with more detail on these reports and their use later.
With respect to the Access to Information Act, I am the senior delegated authority in the department, Mr. Chairman. Ms. Thomsen and Ms. Sabourin, whom you met with on May 29, are also delegated authorities under the act, and Ms. Sabourin, as you are aware from her testimony, is the ATIP coordinator for the department.
The department handles a very heavy load of access to information and privacy requests, as well as a growing volume of access consultation requests from other government departments and agencies. Last year the department received a total of 2,263 requests, of which 648 were requests under the Access to Information Act; 202 requests under the Privacy Act; 766 requests for consultation under both acts; and 464 privacy requests from investigative bodies, principally police forces conducting criminal investigations. All told, a total of 173,635 pages were processed by the department's access to information and privacy protection division in 2006.
I give you those statistics just as context to the discussion we're going to have.
The volume of access to information requests has increased 10% annually on average over the past five years, but in this past fiscal year there was a significant 31% increase. In addition, the files are becoming, not surprisingly in an environment of information technology, increasingly voluminous and complex. The requirement for trained ATIP personnel is growing commensurately in the labour market as is, at the same time, the shortage of qualified and interested personnel.
The department processes requests under the Access to Information Act under a process that Ms. Thomsen described in her remarks on May 29 and that I will not repeat here. I would like to emphasize two points, however.
First, recommendations as to redactions to be made in any text are the initial and primary responsibility of the office of principal interest. The ATIP analyst is responsible for exercising a challenge function, when necessary, and for identifying the sections of the act that may be used in claiming an exemption or an exclusion. So you have the two points in the department that deal with it: the office of principal interest that looks at the text initially, and then the ATIP analysis that exercises a challenge function on the suggested redactions and provides the sections of the act under which such exemptions can be justified.
The processes in place at the department are in keeping with those used in other government departments and agencies and in keeping with the policies and guidelines developed by the Treasury Board, which has the general responsibility for overseeing the government's implementation of the provisions of the act, and with that, of course, you are very familiar. With respect to section 15 of the act, which has been the subject of much discussion in this committee, under section 15 the department can exempt from disclosure information that would impair Canada's ability to effectively conduct international relations now and in the future.
Secondly, I can assure members of the committee that the procedures followed by my department do not allow for any political engagement in the redaction of documents, and I can state categorically that in my many years as a public servant, which span the full period since the act was adopted in 1983, I have never seen evidence of inappropriate ministerial involvement in the release of information, nor has any such involvement been brought to my attention.
In conclusion, I would just like to say a few words about the four specific access requests which the committee is studying. I will leave the discussion of their specific involvement in these files to Ms. Nixon, Ms. Archambault, and Mr. Switzer respectively.
I would simply wish to state the following. As you are aware, one of these requests from Professor Attaran has been the object of two formal complaints to the Information Commissioner. We have now received a copy of the Information Commissioner's response to one of the complaints filed by Professor Attaran. In his letter to the professor, copies of which I can provide to the committee today in both official languages, Mr. Marleau finds that the department was late in responding to the professor's request. This is clear. In her testimony before this committee, Ms. Sabourin acknowledged this tardiness and apologized to the committee publicly for it, as she had earlier apologized to Professor Attaran in a letter.
Mr. Marleau concludes his letter to the professor with the following statement:
DFAIT responded to your request on April 23, 2007, resolving the delay complaint. It is my view that DFAIT's general handling of your request was done neither maliciously nor intentionally to prevent you from obtaining access to the records you requested. That said, I will record your complaint as resolved. In your representations to my investigator, you allege that DFAIT concealed records, an obstruction of a right of access under paragraph 67.1.(1)(c) of the Act. Our investigation determined that there was no evidence to support that allegation against DFAIT with respect to your particular request.
Mr. Chairman, those are my comments, my opening statement. I understand that later this morning other members of my department will be appearing before the committee. So I will conclude at this point. Thank you very much.
