Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. As you mentioned, I am the associate deputy minister at Environment Canada. I am here with two of the key people in the department working on the access to information area: Pierre Bernier, who is the coordinator of our access to information area; and Shelley Emmerson, who is the manager of our access to information office. I will describe in a minute how we all fit into the organization.
We welcome the opportunity to be here today to provide you with some information on how we're following up on the report card from the Information Commissioner and to talk a little bit about the progress we've seen and the progress that we hope to continue to see. Certainly there's more work to be done, but we believe we have put in place some mechanisms that have started to show some progress already.
I should say at the outset that we believe at Environment Canada that the Access to Information Act is an important vehicle by which we can get information out to the Canadian public on government operations and a way by which people can hold us to account. We are strongly committed to access to information and its principles of openness, transparency, and accountability.
Despite the fact that we have experienced a few challenges over the last few years, which I'll outline in a minute, we remain committed to providing that kind of access to records, subject to the very limited special exceptions outlined in the act.
I'll just give you a couple of points of context. At Environment Canada we are consistently among the top 10 institutions in terms of number of requests received per year. We receive a lot of requests to deal with, so there's obviously a workload issue.
In the last five years we have seen that workload increase by about 10% in the number of requests on average every year and on average by about 40% in the number of pages reviewed. It's a big volume, and it's a volume that's been growing. We've had to adapt to that.
That has continued this year. In the statistics we've pulled together at Environment Canada, we've seen a 33% increase in the number of requests this year and a 61% increase in the number of pages reviewed.
We have to find ways to deal with that large and growing workload, in order that we can fulfill our responsibilities under the act.
The access to information office is situated in the corporate secretariat. It currently has 15 employees responsible for processing records, and we're continuing to staff positions to increase that complement. I'll come back to that staffing issue in a moment.
Environment Canada acknowledges the importance of establishing clear accountabilities for access to information issues. The department follows the Treasury Board best practices on delegation of authority. That's why it has delegated full authority to Mr. Bernier and Ms. Emmerson.
Now let me just turn to the report card briefly and talk a little bit about what the report card told us, and how we've responded.
The report highlighted the challenges that were faced by Environment Canada during that time. There was really a range of things that contributed to the poor grade we received.
First, as I mentioned, is the workload we had, and that was acknowledged in the report, that it had been growing. Second, within the department we actually had a fairly significant reorganization, which created several new branches and had an impact on our records retrieval process. So that was something that was self-inflected, if you like, but it was something that contributed to our difficulty in that 2008-09 year that was examined. At the same time during that period, for a short period of time we were processing requests on behalf of Parks Canada, so we were actually taking on additional requests during that year than would normally be in the Environment Canada domain. And finally—and this is one I'll come back to—we had a number of experienced people leave our ATIP office, so we were very short staffed during that time.
We had a heavy workload, we were undergoing a reorganization, we had extra files from Parks Canada, and we had a number of experienced ATIP people leave. So there was a combination of events there that really produced, obviously, the results the commissioner outlined and gave us some things to work on.
I'll come back on the issue of qualified staff, because that's an issue we face, and it continues to challenge us at the department. And it's not unique to the Department of Environment; it's something we see elsewhere, but it is something we're trying to address, and it's probably one of the more significant issues we face.
On the basis of that analysis and information, the commissioner made four recommendations. First was that the deputy minister should allocate sufficient resources to this activity in order to ensure a full access to information staffing complement. Second, we should develop a clear plan to tackle the backlog of access requests, because we had built up, through this period, a backlog of requests that had not been dealt with. And as you know, as that accumulates and you keep getting new ones coming in the door...we need to find ways to deal with that backlog, and the commissioner gave us that recommendation. Next was that we identify and implement measures of record management systems to ensure quicker searches to enable us to meet the timelines, and that we notify the Office of the Information Commissioner of all the extensions that we take for more than 30 days.
We have developed an institutional action plan to address each of these recommendations, and I'm happy to report that the department has made progress in each of the areas identified in the report. I will provide you with several examples of the progress made during my presentation.
In 2008, in response to these, we began developing a departmental ATIP professional development program, which is really a program we put in place to try to get qualified personnel in the access to information area. We were having difficulty recruiting and retaining these people and we needed to develop a good succession plan, so we instituted this program. It's meant to help us bring people into the access to information area, make it a better place for them to be so that they stay with us, and provide some continuity of succession going forward.
Obviously it takes a little time to set it up and put it into the institution, but we're quite confident that in the long run we have to do this kind of thing to be able to get qualified people to work in this area. It's extremely difficult to deal with backlog and new requests coming in if you have a shortage of qualified people or if they're leaving continually.
We're already seeing some signs of success. We've got the second round of recruitment under way and we're starting to see people building their knowledge, not only of the Access to Information Act and how one has to deal with that, but also, importantly, of the department. In this area you have to know the rules, obviously, and how to process that, but you also have to gain a knowledge of the department. We're starting to see that.
The second thing is that we've committed to a plan of trying to deal with the backlog of requests. We've identified those as requiring action, even though we're having some difficulty staffing up to full complement. We have used contractors to try to help us through this because we recognize that we just have to beat down that backlog in order to deal adequately with the flow that's coming in. It's obviously a balance. We can't focus just on the backlog and ignore the ones coming in; similarly, we can't do just the ones coming in and ignore the backlog. We've tried to put some attention on trying to get rid of that backlog over time.
We have made some progress. We've reduced our overall backlog by 28% this year, and we've reduced the backlog of some of our oldest files by over 50%. We are seeing signs of progress, but as in all of these areas, there is more work to be done.
We have instituted information management and ATIP awareness and training to try to sensitize not just the ATIP specialists but also people more generally in the department about how one should manage records and what one needs to do to comply with the requirements of ATIP. We have seen some improvement in the time required to retrieve records. We've gone from an average of 26 days down to 18 days, and our target is to get down to 13 days. We're seeing some signs; we've got farther to go, but in this key element of retrieval of records, we are seeing some signs of life.
It's also allowed us to complete more requests within a 30-day timeframe. In 2008-09 we completed 62% of requests within that timeframe; we're now up to 72% of requests. Hopefully, as I say, we're going to have continued improvement.
The other thing I'd say is that we recognize that this requires leadership from the top, and both the deputy minister and I are taking active roles in trying to ensure that we make progress. Reports on the statistics that we've generated on how we're doing are presented quarterly to the senior management team. The deputy minister and I review those reports, and we are closely watching how our progress is going. We know it's challenging, but we know that we have instituted an action plan. We're seeing some signs of progress and we're looking for more over time.
In terms of our response times, in 2008-09 the average completion time was 97 days. We've seen that come down now to 77 days. Obviously there's room for improvement there, but we are watching it move in the right direction.
We've also strengthened our internal administrative procedures to ensure that the Information Commissioner gets notification of all extensions of more than 30 days.
We have been an active participant interdepartmentally to try to learn from the best practices of other departments. We try to lead through some of our best practices, but we also want to learn what's worked well in other places, so we're always on the lookout to try to pick up what others may be doing well that we can mimic or modify somewhat to work in the Environment Canada context.
Again, we're committed to continuing our efforts. I think you've heard me say that coming out of the commissioner's report, we know there's more work to be done, but we believe we've got a good action plan in place to make progress. We've seen some signs of that progress, and we're on the lookout and closely monitoring for further improvements as we go forward.
With that, I'll end my remarks.
Mr. Bernier, Ms. Emmerson, and I would be happy to take any questions.
