Information & Ethics Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2010

[Bob Hamilton]

Yes. I'll say two things on that.

I was just going to add to what Shelley said on the case before. We haven't talked very much about the part of the process that is consultation with other departments. It's a challenge for us at Environment Canada, because so many of our files touch other departments, whether it's Foreign Affairs, Natural Resources, or provincial governments, and that's really one of the keys.

I think Shelley did a good job of describing the process. You can see that at each stage you have to have good systems to pull the records out, you have to have efficient systems within the department to analyze them...and we have to find ways to have these consultations with other departments in an efficient way, because they can prolong things.

On your second question, what I meant when we talked earlier is that there is an active community out there among, I guess, primarily Shelley and her colleagues, but to some extent Pierre's, who talk to each other about what they're doing, share best practices, lessons learned—that kind of thing. That's where some ideas, such as the training program, come from, and other things that somebody might be doing to improve their search system.

Shelley, does that cover it?

[Shelley Emmerson]

Treasury Board has ATIP community meetings, and we are definitely active participants in these meetings. Either I or one of my staff members always attend the ATIP community meetings. It's a chance to network with colleagues in other departments to discuss best practices.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

I understand, from what you have told us and from what the commissioner has stated, that your staffing complement was not where it needed to be and that you have been working on it. You have talked about the different initiatives you've put in place for training and for retention, and that's good. Taking into account that you have done those things, how do you think your next report card is going to look?

[Bob Hamilton]

I'm an economist, so I have difficulty making predictions about the future, but I guess I want to be realistic. I'd like to get an A on the next report card, but I don't know when the next report card will come for us. I think you could even see in the commissioner's report that it was already referring to some of the signs of progress in the areas identified. There are a couple of glimmers there, I think, in the text of the report.

I think we definitely would see ourselves getting a passing grade. How good it will be is hard to say. We're monitoring it carefully. As Pierre said, some of the things, like the training and development programs, won't have overnight success. But they're the foundation that we have to have for the medium to long term and they are already having some impact.

Some things that we can do to get quicker retrieval of records can have a little bit more immediate impact. Every bit of efficiency that we can squeeze out of our system to just try to take away all the little frictions at each of the steps along the way, which Shelley mentioned, can have immediate impacts. We're starting to see it in reductions in our average times, in the percentage of times that we meet the request in the deadline, and all of those.

I guess that's a long way of not giving you a mark, but we feel we've got a good action plan to address the problems raised in the report. So we'll be looking for a much better mark the next time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Ms. Davidson.

Colleagues, that concludes the first round. We're going to move to the second round.

I just wanted to ask you, Mr. Hamilton, following up on that last question from Ms. Davidson, before we go to the second round, could you elaborate for the committee's benefit what the chain of accountability is here, and who actually is accountable? I understand that Ms. Emmerson is the manager of access to information and privacy. That department reports to the director, to the corporate secretary, who in turn reports to the associate deputy minister, or is it directly to the deputy minister?

[Bob Hamilton]

To the deputy minister.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

To the deputy minister. Okay.

We have the situation where we have the F in the commissioner's report. Does that show up in anyone's evaluation? Is anyone held accountable for this? Does that show up on anyone's personal evaluation for the year?

[Bob Hamilton]

Yes, it does. I'll let Mr. Bernier elaborate on that. Certainly it's part of what's looked at in all of our evaluations. How the department is performing in a number of different areas of management is important for the deputy and myself. But we have followed the Treasury Board's best practices of trying to delegate this responsibility down as far into the organization as we can.

I'll let Pierre elaborate on how we've chosen to do that.

[Pierre Bernier]

Yes, in fact, I am responsible for the results related to access to information within the department.

However, as the commissioner's report states, we are faced with systemic issues. These issues are present pretty much throughout the department.

The two main issues are the difficulty in finding and recruiting qualified staff, which affects our ability to meet deadlines, and the amount of time spent on consultations outside the department, be it consultations with other federal departments or with other levels of government—as Mr. Hamilton mentioned—with the provinces or even municipalities. We also hold many consultations with the industry and the business community, as we possess information that concerns them.

So, yes, I am responsible for the results. We might not have gotten a good grade for our results, but we certainly hope to get a better grade for the efforts we are putting into fixing the problem, over a certain period of time.

[Bob Hamilton]

If I could just add one point, in terms of who's responsible, Pierre is absolutely right.

I guess the point I was trying to make earlier was that we are trying to make sure that we show some leadership on this and that all of the management committee takes some accountability, perhaps a looser sense of accountability than what you've just described, but we do want to see the results. We want to see how we're doing and we want everybody to be collectively engaged in this.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Okay. Thank you very much.

We're now going to start the second round.

Ms. Bennett, five minutes.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Thanks very much.

In the overlap of requests that would touch a couple of departments or maybe touch something in PCO, do you have to share the request with other departments? How often would you have to send it to PCO in order to find out whether or not it can be released?

The refusal rate in the report card at 36.9% seems awfully high. What percentage of that is your own assessment within the department and what refusals were done at PCO or other places?

[Shelley Emmerson]

Certainly consultations do provide a challenge to the department to respond to requests. Because we're a regulatory department, there are a number of requests that require consultation to determine cabinet confidences, and because the environment is a shared jurisdiction, we have a number of files that have to be sent to other departments because we're working cooperatively. Certainly during the 2008-09 period there would have been a number of files that were late owing to consultation requirements, but delays were also caused by capacity issues within our own office in processing the requests as quickly as possible.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Do you know offhand the percentage that would have had to be consulted or the percentage that would have gone to PCO?

[Shelley Emmerson]

Unfortunately I don't have those figures at hand.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

But you could get them for us.

[Shelley Emmerson]

I could, yes.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Okay, because I think that in the--

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

To firm this up, did you want her to table those numbers with the clerk?

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Yes, please. I would like to know the number of requests that were up to your department alone to answer, the number that had to be checked out through a different department, and the number that went to PCO.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Is that clear, Ms. Emmerson? You can table that with the clerk.

Go ahead, Ms. Bennett.

[Bob Hamilton]

I'm not aware of exactly what information we have, but we'll definitely give you whatever we have.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Thank you.

With reference to things like backlogs, it is a little bit worrying that you hope that you'll pass this time. Usually when you get an F, you more or less want the “most improved” award next. It means that all of a sudden there needs to be new attention put on retention, recruitment, and hiring to deal with backlogs, particularly since there is a statutory requirement to get this done.

I would like to know how that happens. What's the problem? We understood that sometimes only half the people who were supposed to be dealing with this were there. How do you do better on that?

Obviously we're very excited by what you have been doing on open government and the various approaches that you've demonstrated you can do in terms of Emitter.ca and these kinds of things. I also think that in terms of the trouble you're in, backlogs could be fixed and even the number of requests decreased if we could move to more of an open government approach, which would actually have all this stuff up there anyway so that people wouldn't even have to ask.

[Bob Hamilton]

Yes, that's a good point, and I like your characterization of “most improved”. That's something for us to shoot for. Maybe we'll get an A, but in any event, we'd like the next one to be “most improved”.

What we're doing is what I've been describing about trying to make progress. The first thing is to get qualified people working on these files. We talk about the backlog, and we've got to get that taken care of, because it's just like a dead weight on us as we try to make progress, but all the time we're trying to deal with it, we're getting increasing numbers of new requests. We have to get qualified people.

Somewhat in the short term, but mostly in the medium term, we have this development program--

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Is it budget resources? Can you not just hire enough people to deal with the backlog?