Mr. Chairman, I find the whole consultation process under the Access to Information Act probably the most disturbing aspect of the regime currently.
There are several departments for which the Treasury Board Secretariat actually states there should be mandatory consultations. It's not just the Privy Council Office; there is anything having to do with law enforcement, so we're dealing with the RCMP. There's also anything having to do with international relations, so we have DFAIT and DND.
As I said before, there is no timeline at all in the legislation for consultations. So there is very little measure of how long these consultations are. They're not measured in the statistics that are collected by the Treasury Board Secretariat. We have only a small sample of those that come to us as complaints.
We do know from experience that the consultations are very long in certain respects. Cabinet confidences consultations are very long. Anything having to do with consultations on international relations takes a long time. So because there's no measure, there's also no accountability, and as I stated before, the consulted department has no responsibility or accountability under the current legislation or under the current administrative regime.
So because of that, there is probably excess in relation to consultations right now, and because these are core departments on very important issues for Canadians, that has a widespread systemic and negative effect on access to information.