Evidence of meeting #14 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was budget.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:05 p.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Compliance and Advice, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
Seventeen.
5:05 p.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
As I say, they're advising, discussing, and processing, for example, trusts. They're not just receiving stuff. There are about seventeen people.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Russ Hiebert Conservative South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC
If you break it down, there are fewer than 200, about 150 people. Is that how you allocate things? You just take the alphabet, break it down, and say, “Here are 3,000; you get the first 150 people, and you get the next”?
5:05 p.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
We've established a new system as of this year whereby we're using a portfolio system. What we try to do is have officers work with people in the same organization. For example, the Immigration and Refugee Appeal Board has lots of members, something in the order of 200. We divided the group into two. One set of officers would deal with that particular group, so if there were any idiosyncrasies of that particular group, there would be an efficient way of dealing with it. We use a portfolio system.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Russ Hiebert Conservative South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC
And of those 14, how many would be assigned to members of Parliament?
5:10 p.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
How many, Lyne?
5:10 p.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Compliance and Advice, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
Two are full-time on members of Parliament.
I'd just like to clarify that when we look at the 17 staff component, only eight of those 17 are advisers currently, looking at files and working with public office holders to develop some mechanisms.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
5:10 p.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Compliance and Advice, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
We have a lot of administrative work following up, annual review letters. A lot of letters go back and forth, so a lot of support staff, people monitoring those reporting functions.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Russ Hiebert Conservative South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC
Okay, so of the eight, two handle the MPs and six handle the 2,600 others.
5:10 p.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Compliance and Advice, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
Currently, yes
5:10 p.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
This is before we get our four extra staff, so there would be a total of 12, I guess. Is that correct, Lyne?
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Russ Hiebert Conservative South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC
My colleague is asking me what the other administrative people do if there is a total of 47 employees and eight do the advisory work and nine support them?
5:10 p.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Compliance and Advice, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
There are two managers for each unit. So there's the social portfolio and then there's the operational portfolio. They both have a manager. Four advisers within those groups report to a manager. There is also an expert adviser who works on very complex and specific files. Then we have more junior staff working on sending out letters, making changes to letters, and following up. All the annual review processes are administered by the lower-level staff where it's just correspondence that needs to be printed out and sent to the clients.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
You're probably a microcosm of every other department where you have your own administrative and operational components.
I think we've covered some good ground here. I know Mr. Wrzesnewskyj had a couple of questions for you, and I wonder if you could speak to the commissioner just to ensure there's clarification of any other necessary information. Okay?
Now that we have conducted our review, we have an opportunity to consider vote 15, which is in the amount of $7,105,000 for the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. I will pose the question: shall vote 15 carry?
OFFICE OF THE CONFLICT OF INTEREST AND ETHICS COMMISSIONER Vote 15--Program expenditures.........$7,105,000
(Vote 15 agreed to)
5:10 p.m.
Some hon. members
Agreed.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
Just so members know, at Wednesday's meeting Mr. Christian Whelan, who is a lawyer in the office of the Ombudsman of New Brunswick, will be here on access to information. He'll be giving us more information, and he'll be with us about an hour to an hour and a half.
Ministers are busy. To get these tidied off, we will have the public safety minister, Mr. Van Loan. We're still trying to get a date.
We will have the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner appear before us.
These are still subject to change, so I'm not going to circulate this. There is one thing we need to do, if it's okay with members, on relatively short notice. We had started to go through the process on the 10 recommendations or suggestions for consideration. We went through it briefly, and we felt we wanted to hear from the minister on this. The minister came back and said he'd have nothing more to add to his testimony from the last time he was before us. We have no further witnesses, so we are at the point where we should maybe go down the 10 again and find out whether or not there is a consensus on whether we take a position on those, so that when we have our meeting with the Privacy Commissioner before we issue a report to the House, we will at least have had an opportunity to find out how we want to approach those 10 points.
I'd ask members to give me a little latitude here. Please have a look at them. I will give you as much notice as possible, depending on whether or not we have a free half an hour or an hour in a meeting to be able to quickly go through them and see where we are, so that when we finally get the Privacy Commissioner here we can tidy that one up.
We will be doing access to information substantively. I don't believe Mr. Poilievre is here on Wednesday either, so his item will be carried forward until next Monday.
Madam Commissioner and colleagues Ms. Benoit and Ms. Robinson-Dalpé, thank you kindly for answering all of the questions the members had, going every which way. It's good to keep in touch with you, and of course, as always, we'd like you to consider us your partner. Please keep us informed of issues and continue to make sure that we're in a position to help you whenever possible as well.
Thank you kindly to all.
We are adjourned.