Thank you.
As I indicated, Mr. Chair, after the events with the Integrity Commissioner's office, given that we were going through audits in any event, I decided to do an audit of our investigative function. I figured that it would be a really good idea for this committee to have some reassurance from an external body that our investigative function was respecting our legislation and that it would be a measure of accountability to this committee, while at the same time be an audit that would be useful for us. So that's what we did.
Essentially there were some uniformity issues within the office in terms of documented events and investigative plans. We have some cases that are fairly simple and some that are more complex. Last year we brought in some new investigators so we needed to make sure that we had a better, more streamlined approach. That's what we're going to do.
One area I'm keen on is priority cases. I have some priority cases that are taking way too long. So how do I make sure I can put more emphasis on those out of a roster of 2,000 cases? We're going to try another pilot project, as I explained to your colleague earlier, which will be headed by a lawyer. I'm doing that because these are complex cases and by having a lawyer supervise the investigators, we can address the issues and questions of the investigators much more quickly and we can go to the institution and ask for representations that are more targeted more quickly. That's part of the problem I'm seeing in the investigations: there's a lot of delay in the back and forth between institutions. It's fine to do that for a while, but it really has to be more disciplined.
Another concern I have is that sometimes an investigation is not necessarily identified as being a priority when it comes in, but events occur and they should be given priority. I felt that this process was not well oiled in my office. We're going to try to do something with our communications folks so there is more interaction between what's going on in the world outside of my office and how we give priority to our investigations should we need to change that.
To me, systemic issues and how we deal with systemic investigations are key things, because when there are individual complaints, each one is conducted in private. I will get additional disclosure, hopefully, for the complainant and the case will be closed. That's fine. We report on those in our annual report. But when we do systemic investigations or report cards, we actually are able to see systemic problems and make recommendations for changes across the system. In the long run, doing that is more effective in improving the access regime. This work, I think, is extremely important. It always taxes my organization, but I think it's valuable, and in fact a lot of the recommendations we've made over time on the report cards and on the systemic investigations have been implemented or are in the process of being implemented, and those perhaps have more of an impact.