Evidence of meeting #28 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was complaints.
A recording is available from Parliament.
3:55 p.m.
Information Commissioner of Canada
Sorry, it's a cabinet confidence consultation with PCO, and that's a bit of a dark hole. It's hard for us to chase those. We can't see the documents.
I've come to the conclusion that the backlog is artificial. It doesn't mean from a service standpoint to the individuals waiting for an answer that it's irrelevant. So we're going to put our service standards on hold and we're going to look at this as an inventory.
There's never going to be a zero-complaint world, so what is the kind of throughput that is normal for an investigative organization to have as an inventory, and classify the requests as administrative, simple, straightforward, complex, and try to provide service in categories, rather than say they're in the queue and if you happen to be behind a complex one, it might take four years.
April 15th, 2008 / 3:55 p.m.
Information Commissioner of Canada
That's right, use a little bit of the emergency care room. You walk in the room and it says “Waiting time is six hours”. The first thing they do is assess life or death when you walk in the door, or do you need to go to radiology because you're having an X-ray, or you need pain management. You can look at these issues in a triage manner. We have to be fair and balanced.
I'm taking a risk here--I'll admit that to the committee--and you'll probably hear complaints in the context though for the next year. So that's one approach, and we have a strategy for that.
The other aspect of why it has grown is that Bill C-2, the Federal Accountability Act, has reduced the complaint period to 60 days. Before, a requester had up to a year to file his or her complaint; now it's 60 days. So I think they're coming in earlier.
I think also Bill C-2 heightened the interest. There's a renewal of requests. If we got an 80% increase in our workload, I suspect that next year's statistics or the end of this year's statistics when produced by Treasury Board will show a comparable workload increase.
I'm not alarmed by it. I think it's manageable. I'm not even addressing at this point that we need more resources for this. We're doing an A-based review. I think with a different approach in terms of managing complaints we can provide better service than we're providing now.
3:55 p.m.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
One quick comment about section 15. We find a lot of people are complaining that section 15 is being used extensively and maybe excessively. Do a lot of your complaints deal with people who are angry at their things being redacted with section 15 as a justification?
3:55 p.m.
Information Commissioner of Canada
Section 15 deals with international relations. I'll ask Andrea to give you a quick overview of percentages.
We have the statistics for this year. This is based on our complaints, not the whole system.
3:55 p.m.
Information Commissioner of Canada
We're not alarmed. There is a change in trends, and I'll let Andrea comment.
3:55 p.m.
Andrea Neill Assistant Commissioner, Complaints Resolution and Compliance, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
Thank you.
We have five top exemptions, and the top ones are always personal information and advice. Section 15, which is the international affairs and defence exemption, tends to be the third—
3:55 p.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Complaints Resolution and Compliance, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
--yes, national security—or fourth spot, but it was definitely in the third spot for this year.
3:55 p.m.
Information Commissioner of Canada
We could leave the committee with a chart that shows kind of the evolution over 2005, 2006, and 2007. It's kind of self-evident that things have shifted, but there's nothing dramatically different for all of the exemptions.
3:55 p.m.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
That would be very interesting. If that could be tabled, that would be useful.
3:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
We will make that available to the committee members.
Mr. Wallace, please.
3:55 p.m.
Conservative
Mike Wallace Conservative Burlington, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to try to be quick, because I have a fair number of questions, and you may hear from me again.
I'm one of these guys who keep last year's book to compare what you said we were going to do last year.
Now, I know you're relatively new, so I'm not sure if these are your numbers or not, but I'm a little confused already, based on what you presented today.
The operating budget for 2006-2007 had 57 people. They were claiming that was going to go to 90 in 2007-2008. That was the estimate. It looks as though, in the current book, we have 61 people. Then you tell me on your list you have 78. So there are a lot of people hanging around, and you don't know where they are or something.
Can you tell me what the discrepancy is and why that issue is there? Because this is all the information we have. Also, I'm looking at a 19% increase of the total budget at the end, and that doesn't reflect going up by...well, even from 61 to 90 is about a 40% increase in people. So the amount of money you're asking for does not reflect the number of people you're looking to get.
Regarding the numbers of people, it goes down after that to 82 people. How are you going to meet the backlog if you're going to have fewer people? I'll leave it up to you to explain to me.
4 p.m.
Information Commissioner of Canada
On the last question, Parliament voted a special allotment of some $650,000—I'm rounding figures—for three years standing to address the backlog.
4 p.m.
Information Commissioner of Canada
Yes and no. I'll explain in a moment.
Because of the space issue, last year we lapsed $1.3 million, which we could not spend. So the 61 FTEs you see in this report represented the number of people staffed. That's the actual use we made of FTEs. We went from 56—
4 p.m.
Information Commissioner of Canada
Yes, that's right—because we couldn't staff it. This year we used the $650,000 allotment in a different strategy by hiring chiefs and reviewing management levels, hiring some extra administrative staff and investigators, and we got to 78, which is the figure I reported to you when I appeared last year. In fact, that's what I commented on today.
4 p.m.
Conservative
4 p.m.
Information Commissioner of Canada
The 90 in 2008-2009 is the planned number if we get the supplementary estimate allotment that will be before you in Parliament. Treasury Board is—