Once again, I invite committee members to open the document we handed out and to turn to page 3 at Tab 2. You will see what Mr. Drapeau told you about the 971 requests he submitted. He was asked how many he had submitted at one time, and his response was the following:
“Eight, nine. It may be more than that, yes.”
Well, on page three,
you will see that there were more than 8 or 9. At times, there were 72, 44, 20, 26, and 38. During the first six months that the corporation was subject to the Access to Information Act, Mr. Drapeau submitted 491 requests.
We were clearly not prepared for that. However, we acted diligently. We consulted other government departments that were subject to the Access to Information Act. We looked at England to determine the scope of the resources the BBC had devoted to that. We were therefore prepared for a reasonable number of requests, and we were clearly astonished by the number of requests that were made.