The point I want to make is that order-making power is not a panacea. It's not the end of the road. It doesn't mean that you'll have compliance. You are now opening a new door where the institution or the requester will say, “Let me go to court now, because I'm not happy with this.” So you go full circle. What have we done now? What have we accomplished?
In the meanwhile, you have dramatically and drastically transformed the role of the ombudsman into a judicial officer. He's going to be in his office; he's going to be acting at administrative tribunals. He will no longer have persuasive power. He will no longer have the very vast powers that he now has. Probably in the process you're going to be asking requesters to engage the services of lawyers, because there will be an administrative law process that we now have to go through.
That's not what your predecessors meant, and I say “your predecessors” in the long range from 1966 to the green paper of 1977, and I'm referring to a couple of cabinet discussion papers. All the discussion that took place in Parliament before the enactment of the act itself was a careful balance of asking, what model do we want?
This model, ladies and gentlemen, we have exported to a number of countries. A number of countries have followed our example of how to have an access to information law, and they've adopted basically what is the Canadian Access to Information Act. The principle that was also accepted by a Committee on Human Rights at the United Nations is a carbon copy of the act.
So change if you must, but why are we changing? If you think that by changing it, giving it order power, things will now happen and institutions will now respond to it, my point to you is that if they're not responding to the sovereign power and the authority of this committee and of the Information Commissioner, why would they now all of a sudden respond adequately to a decision by an Information Commissioner?