As I see it, every information commissioner is completely different. Each one develops his own approach. In my case, when I took up this position, I started looking at the files. I read every complaint sent to the Office; Assistant Commissioner Neill now does the same.
We are very well acquainted with the inventory and we review it together. We think of strategies that we could implement in relation to the total inventory. We currently have about 2,000 complaints. That is still a lot of cases to manage, as I freely admit, but we are identifying trends in relation to certain institutions, complainants, sections or provisions of the Act, or some key or controversial subjects, and are trying to focus more on that. We also assign cases to investigators more strategically. If we have a whole series of cases connected to a specific department, we will assign them to one or two investigators. They then work together and are more efficient, because they know the institution, the complainant and the subject.
Furthermore, we also make more use of the specific expertise of certain investigators. If some of them are from the RCMP or the Canada Revenue Agency, we will assign them files that relate to those organizations. That allows us to ensure more effective case management.
Over the course of the next year, Ms. Neill and I will be focusing on complex cases. In terms of the OIC's inventory, I have noted that, historically—in other words, over the last 26 years—the complex cases are the ones that took time and continue to do so. Those are the ones we are trying…