Evidence of meeting #7 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 3rd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was institutions.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
Yes.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
What percentage of requests get a response within 30 days?
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
According to the Treasury Board statistics, it's 57.1%.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
How many get a response within 120 days? Or what percentage, I should say.
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
Within or after 120 days, Mr. Chair...?
Conservative
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
Before?
Well, you'll have to help me with the math, Mr. Chair. It's 57, plus 20, plus 10, so it's roughly 87%.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
It's 87%. so you have this enormous process where there are 34,000 questions being asked, many of these questions requiring dozens of pages of information. More than half of those questions are getting an answer within 30 days and 88% are getting a response within 120 days.
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
That's true, Mr. Chairman.
One of the things we highlighted in the special report is the fact that the statistics from the Treasury Board Secretariat need to be looked at somewhat in the context of Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada receives 14,000 of those 34,000 requests every year. They have fairly simple types of requests that deal with personal information, so they're easily exempted and easily processed. In fact, that's reflected in their performance. Their average response time is 34 days, so 14,000 out of the 34,000 get a responded to in 34 days by CIC, so--
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
Right, I appreciate that. But because now we are wandering quite far from the question, if you're going to put into context some of the departments that have an easier process of response, then I will counter that by pointing out the obvious fact that there are departments that are going to have, necessarily, difficulties in responding.
Foreign Affairs often has to get approval from foreign governments because information is jointly proprietary. Therefore, that would bring the average down.
There are also access requests that are broadly written in a way that makes it difficult for any department to produce a comprehensive response. For example, someone might ask for all of the internal e-mails on the ecoENERGY program. Well, what about the week when 20 public servants were trying to arrange a meeting and they exchanged 75 e-mails in determining the time, the place, the location, and agenda of that meeting. All of those e-mails have to be considered for potential release, and none of them is really of any interest to the questioner.
So in those instances, there's a whole complication that has literally nothing to do with the desire to disclose, but has an impact on the time it takes to do so. If you're going to give examples of how the average might be improved by one particular department, I would like to point out there are factors that would cause the average to be extended. I would say that of 34,000 requests, if 88% of them get a response within 120 days, I think we're doing very well.
I want to compare that, though, with past years. For the last year for which you have comparable data, how does that 88% score compare?
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
Mr. Chairman, what I do see from the statistics from 2002 is that the percentage of requests responded to within 30 days was 69% in 2002. What we have seen steadily over the years since 2002 is that there's no specific larger gap or larger change, except that steadily since 2002 the number has come down, to 57%. So we have had a decrease of 12% in the number of requests responded to within 30 days and I do have concerns about that in terms of performance.
The other factor that I think is a focus of the report is the extension factor and whether or not the extensions are taken appropriately under the legislation. If you look at the same statistics from 2002 to now, you will see that they're only disaggregated between those below 30 days and those above 30 days. Those are strictly the extensions that are taken, which are a large focus of the report cards.
What we see is that the amount of extensions that are for more than 30 days, for a search through a large volume of records, which is one of the exemptions that can be taken, has gone from 58% to 70% year over year since 2002. Again, it's a steady increase of time. For consultations, they've gone from 40% in 2002 for the ones that are for more than 30 days to 81% in this past year. There has been an increase of over 40% in terms of consultations. Similarly, third-party consultations have gone up by 10%.
This is really where the delays are occurring. Furthermore, as I stated in the report, this generates almost half of the volume of complaints—
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
—and three out of four of those complaints are found to be justified.
Liberal
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to turn to the Privy Council Office, but before I do, I want to come back to the question of approval versus information, which Mr. Siksay and Ms. Foote were on. On page 11 of your report, where you're taking stock of systemic issues, you mention the concerns over “political interference and delays that may stem from inappropriate or ill-enforced delegation orders”. You go on to talk about how the amount of time it takes for “senior management and ministerial review and approval” generates delays as well.
When Mr. Giorno was here before the committee, he stated that, “No political staff member has received a delegation of authority under the act...”. He said further, “Political staff members do not have authority to be making those decisions, to be interpreting and applying the act”. But increasingly.... One of the reasons we have a motion before this committee to call certain staff, such as Mr. Sparrow and the chief of staff for the Prime Minister, Mr. Giorno, is that increasingly we believe that approval is actually taking place, versus just providing information.
Can you clarify? I know that you turned to Josée at one point. I'm still confused on what is happening within the system. There are two agencies, I believe, and one department that are using an approval process, while others are doing it appropriately. Can you expand on that a little?
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
In terms of CIDA, Josée just passed me the exact language, and basically what it says is that the review process provided packages to the minister's office for review, but the delay in review amounts to approval because the package is not released until the minister's office has had a chance to review. So it basically creates a long delay; as for whether there's any impact on the amount of disclosure, at this point, we don't know.
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
Okay. I think we'll just operate on the assumption that that's really an approval process.
On the PCO, you highlight in a section in your report card that you do have concerns regarding the “delegation order” in the Privy Council Office. Could you explain precisely what those concerns are and whether that involves, to the best of your knowledge, political staff?
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
At the Privy Council Office, the information we got is really that it is within the Privy Council Office. We have no information whatsoever that it involves political staff. What we have been told as well by the Privy Council Office is that as far as they are concerned this does not result in any additional delays. They do so because they need to have the expertise of the people reviewing it.
We heard a similar story at Public Safety, where there's quite a diffused delegation of authority, with quite a few people having the delegated authority to review the documents. I've met with senior officials there as well. They've told us that they consider this is necessary given the type of information that has to be reviewed. They also consider this does not add additional delay.
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
Yet in your report you also talk about staffing issues at the Privy Council Office. I mean, there is any number of ways in which you can delay access to information. One could be by just not having enough staff in place to do the job. That's a great concern.
Has PCO been consulting on a greater number of ATIP requests over recent years? Are these consultations taking longer? Are greater consultations coming out of PCO that are in fact creating these delays?
I'd make the point that they have one of the worst records in town and this is the arm of the Prime Minister's Office. There are 198 complaints.
Interim Information Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada
The Privy Council Office has had years where it has had an F. It now has a D.
In terms of the consultation, Mr. Chairman, I wasn't clear whether the member was referring to cabinet confidence or to consultations with the access to information office. I'm assuming it's cabinet confidence—
