First of all, I don't think there's another jurisdiction in Canada that restrains the right of access to anyone who has to be a resident or residing in Canada. Even as it is now, it's not just Canadian citizens; it's just someone who happens to be here at the moment. I think there's awkwardness in applying the access to information scheme if we ask people why they want it, if they want it for commercial or personal purposes, or if they're a Canadian citizen. All of that doesn't work in an access scheme. Yes, we might get more requests. It's not clear to me that we necessarily would, from around the world, just because we would take that requirement out of it, which is why we're supporting recommendation 1.
That's why I think the five-year review would be so useful. Let's have a mechanism for looking at the whole act to see, first of all, if we can make more things publicly available to avoid people having to make access requests. Can we investigate other ways in which we can be more open and transparent rather than having to go through the access regime? Then just leave the processing of requests for the very significant things like cabinet and things we want to protect for legitimate reasons for a fixed period of time. That would require looking at the whole act.
If we take just one side of the act and imagine that someone from China or someone else might want to make a request, whether that's fair, I think because of this legislation it's impossible to know who's really behind the request and why they want it.