Sure. Thank you for the question.
My office is a central coordinating body for all requests under both the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act. Requests are directed to Mr. Bernier, and our office will open a file and determine where in the department the request should be sent to.
The texts of the requests are sent by e-mail to the various sectors of the department, and we have contact people in place in each area within the department to coordinate the retrieval of information.
Once the documents are retrieved, they're reviewed, and recommendations are approved to an assistant deputy minister level or branch head level, and then the documents are provided to our office with these recommendations.
Once the documents arrive in our office, the files are given to an analyst to process the remaining portions of the file. We will conduct any of the necessary consultations required, and once the consultation responses are received and our own line-by-line analysis is completed, we'll prepare the documents for approval. The files are approved by Mr. Bernier, as the ATIP coordinator.