Thank you very much.
Earlier, Ms. Platt mentioned it's easy to overwhelm the system we currently have, especially given there's only a $5 fee. The Information Commissioner has told us that the workload of the government in terms of complying to access to information requests has increased dramatically in the last couple of years and the complaints to his office have increased dramatically. He also told us that the average cost of complying with access to information requests is about $1,425. One of the recommendations is that the access to information system be opened up to everyone in the world, not just Canadians. I have a number of questions, if we were to do that.
First, how would you handle a Canadian request versus a request from somewhere else in the world? Do you think Canadians, given they're funding this rather expensive access to information system, deserve some kind of priority in response, or should they wait until several million other requests, perhaps, were fulfilled from abroad?
Secondly, there are commercial users of the system, as the commissioner mentioned. He mentioned there were a number of users he would describe as data brokers who are in the commercial business of requesting information from the government and then reselling that information to their customers. Should they pay a different fee?
Thirdly, how would you handle the multiple requests from a single user? There was a gentleman who made submissions to this committee a few weeks ago who said he personally made several hundred requests per year on average. I believe he was in a business of looking for information, writing stories, and then selling stories to news organizations.
Perhaps you could give us a sense of how you would handle those situations if we were to open it up to everyone, unfettered, worldwide.