Evidence of meeting #8 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 system.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Do you know if there is any mechanism for a standing committee, for instance, to table legislation and have it debated in the House without the support of the government in any other parliamentary system?
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
No, I don't, not in the Westminster model. The committees devise their powers from the chamber itself. If I may briefly put a hat on as former Clerk of the House--
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
--I strongly advise against putting parliamentary procedures in statute. It hampers the flexibility the House needs from time to time to go in the direction of its choice. If it's bound by law, it has no choice.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
Mr. Siksay, I'm sorry, but we're going to have to move on.
Mr. Wrzesnewskyj, please.
Liberal
Borys Wrzesnewskyj Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON
Thank you.
We have a costly and cumbersome system under which a culture of non-disclosure has developed. In the last couple of years we've seen complaints increase at an exponential rate. We don't seem to have a particular appetite to move into the 21st century and use modern technology to help us with transparency in government, so we're stuck with fixing the existing system.
Moving beyond the particular suggestions and recommendations you've made, I believe ATIP sections are to be at arm's length within each department. Is that not correct?
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
Well, they form part of the operations. There's a delegated authority under the act from the head of the institution to a particular coordinator, but they form part of the operations of the department.
Liberal
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
No. They get a delegated authority from the head of the institution.
Liberal
Borys Wrzesnewskyj Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON
The staff in the ATIP sections typically would come out of the department?
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
Yes. They're generally public servants under the public service act.
Liberal
Borys Wrzesnewskyj Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON
So if someone's using the ATIP process because they have some complaints about a department, the staff in an ATIP section may in fact be putting together documentation on a complaint from an area that they've worked in for years. Could that not happen?
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
There are two aspects. There is the ATIP coordination office, which manages all of the requests, and they refer them to what we call the OPIs, the operating program area. So I'm a busy public servant working on getting pension cheques out in a timely fashion and I get an access request from the coordinator's office that says we drop tools and answer it. That's the dynamic within the department. The information usually comes from the operational side and is not gathered necessarily in a proactive way by the ATIP coordinator. They've furnished the ATIP coordinator according to the needs--
Liberal
Borys Wrzesnewskyj Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON
So even potentially, it's slightly worse that the request goes right to where the problem may lie.
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
Potentially. That's certainly something we experience with--
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
I think the system is predicated such that public servants will respect the law and serve Canadians.
Liberal
Borys Wrzesnewskyj Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON
On that point, last week before the public accounts committee, I raised the issue of the testimony of RCMP officers who worked in an ATIP section. One officer in particular raised the whole issue of how he prepared an ATIP request to be sent out, was called in by a deputy commissioner into the commissioner's boardroom, and was asked for a switcheroo to take place. The deputy commissioner had prepared a different package and wanted it to be switched with the package that the officer had presented.
We heard other disturbing testimony as well. In fact, a parliamentary committee made a request for documents from the ATIP section within the RCMP on a Wednesday evening. On the Friday, right at close, one of the deputy commissioner's key staffers arrived requesting those very same documents, documents that I would assume they would already have copies of within the deputy commissioner's office, so I'm not quite sure why they would have been requested.
You see, what I'm getting at is this. How can you have confidence that the system is working when there isn't an arm's-length relationship between the department and those access sections? As for most people who would be requesting, either they have an academic interest.... But the average citizen, journalist, or MP would be requesting because they have concerns. We're making those requests for people to be absolutely forthright and transparent with us. We're making requests to the very people who may in fact have made mistakes or, in the worst of all worlds, who may be engaged in a cover-up.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
We're almost out of time. I'm going to give this to Mr. Marleau for his response.
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
I'll try to respond very briefly, Mr. Chairman.
We hear anecdotes of ATIP coordinators under pressure by management to delay, to not disclose, to amber-light to buy time, and all that sort of thing. We hear that. Part of it, I think, is mythical and part of it is probably true, but in terms of what we see through investigations, it is a rare occasion that we can actually pinpoint an individual in that kind of behaviour you are describing.
What's wrong with the ATIP coordinator's relationship with the head of the institution is that too many times they are so far down the rung that they have very little influence on the system within their own department. They're under-resourced, and sometimes that may be deliberate, I can't say for sure. But certainly there isn't the commitment to fix it such as they did in the Department of Justice recently.
Unless these people are specifically trained and have their own identity, the competencies and the certification, like internal auditors who have professional accountabilities that they must live up to, that won't change. I think that would go a long way in building confidence, expertise, and professionalism in the corps of ATIP coordinators.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to meet again with Mr. Marleau.
Earlier you stated that the addition of 69 new institutions to your mandate did not materially impact your workload. But I understood you to say last week that at least half of the complaints you're dealing with are directly related to the CBC. There seems to be a misalignment between those facts and your statement today. Could you clarify this for me?
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
If we take just the crown corporations as an example, the CBC was really an exception last year, which was the first year they came in under the statute. For all of the other crown corporations, we've seen normal activity, either in terms of numbers of requests globally or in numbers of complaints.
The CBC was facing a situation, as I described in recommendation 12, of multiple similar requests by a single user all at the same time. No institution, in my view, could have responded within 30 days, and no institution could have responded, with a reasonable extension that we're proposing, in terms of 60 days. At the same time, I got 435 complaints or whatever it was. There's no way I could respond to those within 90 or 120 days.
We have to take the CBC out of that mix, I think, if we want to look at the curve. In terms of the extension of the scope of the act to the extra agencies, the total requests in the system came to about a 6% impact, year over year.
On the complaints side, the 142% increase was not due to the specifics of the added institutions but partly due to the fact that the complaint period was reduced to 60 days from one year. Requesters are complaining sooner; they must complain sooner or lose their right to complain.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK
I have another question. Is it not true that the reforms made by the Conservative Federal Accountability Act are the most significant reforms to ATI since the act was passed in 1983?
Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
Yes, they considerably broadened the scope of the act.