Order.
This is the ninth meeting of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are working on our study of the Access to Information Act reform.
Today we have three witnesses on this matter who are appearing before us by video conference. They include Mr. David Loukidelis, Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia since 1999. He has written numerous decisions on ATIP, both in the public and private sector. He is also engaged in securing full implementation of the ATIP legislation in his province. He is also a professor at the University of Victoria, where he teaches ATIP law.
We also have Mr. Stanley L. Tromp. Mr. Tromp is a journalist who became very familiar with the process of information requests while a reporter for the UBC student newspaper, The Ubyssey. His Freedom of Information Act request for the UBC Coca-Cola marketing contract in 1995 prompted a five-year legal dispute, a successful B.C. Supreme Court appeal, and an influential ruling on disclosure by the B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner. He initiated the FOI caucus of the Canadian Association of Journalism and was one of the founders of the group of B.C. journalists for freedom of information in 1998. His stories, informed from B.C. FOIPP Act requests, have been published in the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, the Georgia Straight, the Vancouver Magazine, The Vancouver Courier, and many other publications.
Finally, we have Mr. Murray Rankin. He is a partner with the law firm Heenan Blaikie, where he practises and focuses on public law issues with particular reference to aboriginal law, environmental law, and information and privacy law. His interest in freedom of information and privacy issues has enabled him to work at the OECD in Paris in its directorate of science, technology, and industry on trans-border information flows. His résumé goes on extensively, but he has been a consultant to the House of Commons committee that conducted the reviews of the Access to Information Act and Privacy Act in 1987 and 1992.
Welcome, gentlemen. I understand two of you are in Victoria, and one of you, Mr. Tromp, is in Vancouver.
We have't talked in too much detail about how we'd like to proceed with you, other than to say we would like to have your input on a number of aspects, particularly your view and assessment of the condition of the access to information system as it stands now and of the legislation, your commentary on some of the consequences of that condition, and maybe some of the solutions, both administrative and legislative, to help us understand better the urgency of the work before us.
What I'm going to do is give you five to seven minutes each to make some preliminary comments to the committee. Then I'm going to turn the floor over to the committee members to pose questions to you based on the representations you've made.
We're going to start with Mr. David Loukidelis, commissioner for access to information and privacy of B.C.
Mr. Loukidelis, please.