Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming here to speak to us today.
As you know, this committee has been conducting a study on open government over the past few weeks. I tell you that because I want to draw a parallel between access to information and open government.
As part of our study on open government, a number of witnesses told us that the number of ATI requests had dropped sharply because their department was being more open and disclosing more information to people.
I, myself, recently wrote to a department asking for a list of the government's legal service providers. The answer I got was that the government would not disclose the names of those suppliers.
To me, that is a flaw of an open government. I then made a request under the Access to Information Act. The person who had written to my office asking for the information initially also made the same request, as did our party's critic. So three requests for the same information were made. But had that information appeared on the Web site, there would have been three fewer requests.
I want to know whether you had worked on an action plan to help your organization become more open and to reduce the number of access to information requests. Or are you of the opinion that such an approach has no place at CBC?