Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here today, Mr. Giorno. I'm sure you're a very busy guy, and I'm sure you had many other things you could be doing this morning. So thank you for coming.
I want to echo what other members have said, given our concerns about the initial request around this issue, but also given the information commissioner's report card today. Many of us are very concerned that there is a developing culture of secrecy, a fairly highly developed culture of secrecy, that there has been mounting inattention to transparency on the part of this government. And many of us believe that access to information and the ability of Canadians and others to see the information of government is the oxygen of our democracy, and we're concerned that depriving our democracy of that oxygen is a very serious issue.
The information commissioner's report today is very serious, indeed. The fact that the Privy Council Office gets a “D” in that report is, I hope, very concerning to you and your colleagues. The fact that one department, Foreign Affairs and International Trade, was so bad that the commissioner couldn't even find a way to rate it in the scale of her exercise and she had to issue a red alert is also extremely concerning and something that I hope is demanding the immediate attention of government.
That being said, I want to ask some specific questions. You described the notification process that happens when an access request is ready to be released. You talked about four days' notice that's given. There's been some concern that this notification process has in fact turned into a consultation process, where staffers have tried to convince officials to release less information. They have made suggestions that it might damage relations with another level of government, a provincial government or a foreign government, as a way of diverting it to the Privy Council Office and further delaying it.
Could you comment on the fact that the notification process seems to have morphed into something other than mere notification so that a department can prepare an appropriate response to released information?