Yes. Thank you for the question.
First of all, I believe that I have a lot of things to do, in spite of the very kind words of the honourable member, Madame Freeman, and a certain media profile that came to the office without our really trying to obtain it. There are a lot of very practical things to do, particularly in improving our service delivery to Canadians, in keeping up on trends, and in trying to be strategic about our interventions. There were these two I think very, very big cases that involved a lot of people and so on, but we have a lot of homework to do still.
The three years come from the fact that I thought it was about three years between the time I was appointed in late 2003, to 2006, when we finally got back something called our “staffing delegation”. Without that delegation, we couldn't hire our own employees without public service approval. If you're under that kind of cloud for two and a half years, you can't do very much. You're basically under a cloud of suspicion and, as a result, a lot of people perhaps don't come to work for you.
Once we got out of that cloud of suspicion, then we could tackle the second thing, which was getting a budget that was appropriate. Our budget had been frozen at its 2000 level, and then, because of all the things had happened, Treasury Board just said to get our house in order and they would look at our budget, which made sense again. I'll pass on the other inquiries we were subject to and so on.
So basically in that time.... As you know, it is very unusual in the public sector to have an agency that is in such a state. So because of the time I spent personally on all of those issues, which are not really part of an ongoing privacy commissioner's mandate, I didn't get around to some other substantive issues. I'd like to do that. I'd like to take back the equivalent of the time I spent on housekeeping and benefit from some of the wonderful people we now have, given that we're in better shape.
We're now able to attract a whole group of extraordinary and mostly younger employees who are increasingly doing an amazing job. I'd like to be able to leverage their talents in many areas, particularly in what's happening on the Internet and the interface between the Internet and society and information technologies of all kinds and to help Canadians with those problems.