Information & Ethics Committee on March 30th, 2010

[Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you for that information. I have one last question. My colleague was talking about priority cases earlier. How many people are assigned to priority cases, and do you need additional resources to process them?

[Suzanne Legault]

The unit that processes more complex cases is composed of about 12 investigators. We have three separate areas: complaints coming in and administrative complaints, the previous inventory, as well as other files—including more complex files that are assigned to experienced investigators. That is the team that deals with priority complaints.

At the present time, I have an inventory of 2,000 cases, 450 of which have not been assigned, which worries me. In the course of the next fiscal year, we will be doing a quick review of these files to try and resolve them and see what they are all about.

Do we require additional resources? Well, as I said earlier, we will definitely have to analyze our business model. For now, we are still making adjustments and improvements. Many of our investigators are new; they are gaining experience and becoming more effective. Also, we are now providing very targeted training. For example, next year I would like to highlight certain parts of the legislation. So, in order to be more effective, we will be focussing on that in our investigator training program.

So, for the time being, Ms. Thi Lac, I have been unable to assess all the efficiencies; that is the first step. Afterwards, I can come back and tell you if we have budget issues.

[Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mrs. Davidson, please.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for being with us again today. Certainly it's great to hear about your success and accomplishments.

I looked at the graphs you provided, and thank you for that. Certainly it is always easier, for me, at any rate, to relate to the picture that is portrayed through a graph. When I look at the status graph of the inventory at month end, which started in November 2008 and concludes in March--this month, right now--the difference in the open and closed cases is amazing. Certainly that is good news.

When I look at the March 2010 graph, it is showing 1,206 closed cases and 388 open cases. They include 21 that are on hold. Are they among the 388 open ones?

[Suzanne Legault]

They are within the 388. Those 21 are in the old inventory, but they are on hold because of litigation.

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

Have most of them been there for quite some, or is this recent?

[Suzanne Legault]

The ones that are on hold are the CBC cases, mostly, so those are from last year. They are fairly recent.

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

All right. Then I look at this round graph. Could you just explain that a little bit, please?

[Suzanne Legault]

That is the one entitled “Types of Complaints”. Actually, I answered this earlier. It's the split in the types of cases we have. Administrative complaints deal with deemed-refusal cases. When a requester is not provided with information within the time limits of the act, that is deemed a refusal. Whether there are extensions that are being improperly applied or fees that are improperly applied, those are administrative types of complaints. I must say that on these, we've been working very hard with institutions. We've met with nine departments that have a high level of complaints. I want to eliminate those administrative complaints. As far as I'm concerned, they are a waste of time in the system. We should not have them, and institutions should not have to deal with them. They should be a lot lower than 48%, because we should really not have them. I am trying now to work with institutions so that we reduce that significantly. They are an inefficiency in the system.

The refusal complaints, the 50%, are the crux of access to information. Those are the exemptions. That is what Mr. Rickford was talking about earlier in terms of the exemptions that need to be applied on national security, on foreign affairs, and on personal information. This is the balance we need to strike in matters of access to information. These are the complex cases. And these are where I say to a department that if the bulk of the issues between the information commissioner and the department are located in refusal complaints, that is the appropriate place for them to be, because they are in a grey area. There is a lot of discretion, so this is appropriate.

As for administrative complaints, I think everybody is wasting their time on them, and we should work very hard to lower that number.

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

Thank you.

You talked about your staffing levels and the challenges you've had over past years with being understaffed. Now you're overstaffed because of using some of your operational dollars toward staffing.

Do you see this as a temporary action to deal with the backlog? Do you think this will be adequately handled through your regular staffing budget without using operational dollars? I know you've made remarkable progress with the backlog, but do you see that levelling off and decreasing the need to use operational dollars that way?

[Suzanne Legault]

I must say two things. First, I've always had a tendency to overstaff a little bit. If you've been following the demographics in the Public Service of Canada, particularly with the young people, there's a lot of movement. The employees at the Office of the Information Commissioner are public service employees, so I expect there will be movement. In fact, it's a good thing for public service employees to move around the federal public service. So I do have a tendency, as a manager, to overstaff a little bit to compensate for that because I expect movement. I think it's normal.

Second, until we have completely reined in these 2,000 cases back to about 500, I expect to make significant use of consultants to deal with the complaints.

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

So when you say 500 a year, you're comparing the 2,000 to the 500.

[Suzanne Legault]

Yes. The business model we developed contemplates having a normal carryover from year to year in our inventory of about 500. It's a very significant thing, because if you look at the history of access to information and read the annual report of Inger Hansen, who was the first information commissioner, she dealt with 50 cases, she carried forward 50 cases. That's where it started.

So we're trying to reverse that trend. In 2006-07, with the FedAA we were carrying over about 1,500 cases a year. Our inventory was about 1,500, except we got a spike to 2,500 and that's when we got into trouble. We're trying to reverse that so we only carry over a minimal inventory.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Thank you.

Mr. Siksay is next, please, followed by Mr. Easter.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Ms. Legault, I want to come back to two of your responses to Mr. Rickford. You said that one of the trends you noticed was a decrease in the number of requests where all the information was disclosed. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that and let us know if you've done any analysis of what seems to be going on there.

[Suzanne Legault]

These are Treasury Board statistics. The trend is most interesting if you look at it from far away. In 2002-03 we disclosed everything in the documents almost 30% of the time. Now we're at 18%. In 2006-07 we were at 23%. Now we're at 18%.

What's disclosed in part is increasing. That's the trend. What does it mean? It's difficult to say. I don't see all of the requests. This is an analysis that would be interesting to the administration body, the Treasury Board Secretariat. When you look at these statistics they're interesting. The ones that are compelling are about consultations and extensions.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

But before you go there, on the issue around the decline in the number of requests that are fully disclosed, would that be part of your systematic analysis project? You mentioned it's a project for Treasury Board.

[Suzanne Legault]

We won't be looking at that in the systemic investigation. We're going to look at consultations.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Okay.

[Suzanne Legault]

We really have no information on consultations. When Parliament is looking at possible administrative reform to improve the performance on access to information, I am convinced that consultation is where we have to concentrate. I don't have all of the data yet. That's why we're doing the systemic investigation. We need to understand it a lot better.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Is it a problem with legislation or is it a problem with administrative policy at this point?

[Suzanne Legault]

You can always do both. You can always amend legislation. There are no timelines in the legislation to put any kind of discipline on consultations. There are no timelines on extensions, as you know. Administratively, no statistics are being collected that are instructive on consultations, and therefore no accountability can be had. When we have complaints, I get the complaint against the institution that makes the request for a consultation, but the consulting institution is not the subject of the complaint. If the institution that's consulting does not get the result of the consultation on time, they are the ones in deemed refusal. They are the ones that have the bad record. The way the system is set up administratively for consultations, there's no real data and there's no accountability and there's nothing in the legislation. I suspect it's a major cause of delays.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you on that score.

Ms. Legault, your budget process is a little different from others, because as an officer of Parliament I guess you first work through the advisory panel on the funding and oversight of officers of Parliament, and then that request goes on to Treasury Board. Can you just refresh our memory about how that process works?

I guess my ultimate question is, is there a difference in amount in what the panel recommended and the ultimate request from Treasury Board?

[Suzanne Legault]

The process that's been developed with the panel on the oversight and funding of officers of Parliament is that we first make our case to the Treasury Board Secretariat, and quite a stringent analytical process goes on there to make sure our request for funding is adequate. We attempt to come to an agreement in terms of what's presented before the panel, then we come to the panel and we present our request for funding, and the panel makes a recommendation to Treasury Board whether or not to agree with the request.

The last time we went, the panel recommended our full funding request, but Treasury Board did not grant all our Treasury Board requests. About $600,000 was cut, and it was mostly for salaries for systemic investigation.