Information & Ethics Committee on May 8th, 2018

[Caroline Maynard]

Currently, we have 11.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

You have how many—

[Caroline Maynard]

We have 50 investigators total, 22% are consultants, and we want to increase that to an additional 11 consultants. We only had the one year, so we cannot go and hire employees. We could do it on a term basis. We're going to start a competition soon for new employees, but without the promise of permanent and long-term employment, sometimes it's difficult to recruit.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

How many people do you have investigating currently?

[Caroline Maynard]

There are 50.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Out of a total of how many employees?

[Caroline Maynard]

It's 93.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Out of 50, you have 2,600 cases that you get every year. On average, one person gets around 50 cases to investigate.

[Caroline Maynard]

Yes, it was actually about 45 cases per—

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

How long does it take, on average, to investigate a case?

[Caroline Maynard]

It takes nine months, on average. Some cases are very short, but other cases take longer.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Okay.

Looking at your annual report, if you look at your chart, the highest year or the highest mark was a 40% disclosure rate that you had going back as far as 1997 to 2015-16, and there has not been much legislative change on a year-to-year basis. Why is it not consistent, or is your office trying to do anything to increase the disclosure rate by hiring more people? Is that your forward-looking...?

[Caroline Maynard]

I think what you're referring to is the disclosure rates at the institution level. When there is a request of access, the institutions will release 40% of the information and will use exclusions and exemptions to protect most of the information that they are being requested to release.

We do see an increase in secrecy. We don't know why, and that's something that...I am new to the job, so my mandate will be to make sure that we understand where it comes from. We are working towards a culture of openness. The government is a very pro open government at this point, so we need to get this message down to all the levels. I don't know if it's the OPI, the person the information is coming from who is redacting, or the ATIP coordinators who have been told to redact, but clearly the message is not there. That's something I need to work with the coordinators on.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

How much time do I have left? Two minutes?

I'll give it to Mr. Sheehan.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you.

Congratulations, Caroline, on your recent appointment. I saw the release from the Prime Minister's Office. You have quite an impressive resumé, and I look forward to your commitment and ideas, going forward.

Some of your ideas that you talked about, your remarks, were about how you can employ technology in the office to help deal with the increased number of requests for information. As you mentioned, this government is about openness and transparency, and as we continue that messaging, we're surely going to get more and more interest and requests. You did mention the $2.9 million in temporary funding over the $11.4 million. You talked a lot about some of your ideas in taking your temporary workers and making them into full-time workers.

Would you share with us your philosophy? You don't have to get into the details precisely about the technology and the computers you're using and whatnot, but rather just your comments about employing technology to help deal with the open and transparent environment.

[Caroline Maynard]

It's interesting because technology is at a lot of different levels, and it could be as easy as.... I was surprised when I started my new position that I had only one screen in my office. I was used to using two screens and people were questioning me. However, when you do a paper review, and you have your file on one screen, you can work on your Word document on the other screen, instead of going back, up and down and up and down. Nobody seems to have used that, so I ordered two screens for everybody at the office. That was one of my first decisions.

There were a lot of people doing reviews on paper, still, and changing words with a red pen like a teacher. We're now using track changes. Yes, things like that, it could be as easy as this.

It could be as complex as how we interact with the institutions on a more efficient basis. I'm not talking about emails. We'll also try to interact more face to face. If you have a thousand pages, sending an email for each line that is being redacted takes a lot longer than if you do it face to face and we go through it together. There is going to be some of that.

The exchange of information is still all done by mail and we've just, in the last year, started using emails to send our responses to complainants in institutions. I want to do a lot more of that, and I want to receive the complainant's arguments and the institution's representations through electronic means. However, we need to have a protected system for that because there is a lot of personal information and a lot of secure information. For any top secret or secret information, we'll never be able to use this technology, but for any normal cases where there is the protected B type of information, I think we can get to that, where we'll have a portal, maybe, and the information will be sent to us. We're looking into all of that.

I am also talking with the Privacy Commissioner because they're looking at some technology also to find, just within the document, information that is repetitive, so you can do a search. There is a lot of technology at that level that we're going to be looking into.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Thanks very much.

We have six minutes left in our meeting and I'd like to vote on the main estimates to get that out of the way.

Mr. Gourde, you can have two questions.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm comforted to know that you've incorporated more technology-based solutions. Everyone is better off if things go more quickly.

Do you process complaints in the order they are received, or do you categorize them first? Do you have investigators who specialize in different types of complaints and others who deal with more complicated files? Would categorizing complaints speed up the process? Do you work on a first-come, first-served basis?

[Caroline Maynard]

It's a bit of both. We realized that certain investigators were more compatible with certain institutions or complainants. In those cases, it's not even an issue. Those investigators are assigned the complaints and files from the corresponding individuals.

We explored the idea of assigning files by portfolio, but that doesn't always work given that some files involve more than one subject. That makes it hard to identify the main issue in the file. Nevertheless, we do triage new files to determine whether we can facilitate the resolution process as soon as a complaint comes in. However, if the file appears to be more complex, it is assigned to an investigator. As I said, it's a bit of both.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Once all the heavy lifting is done, are complainants usually satisfied with the response they receive? Do you have statistics showing, for instance, that it's half-and-half, or that people are generally satisfied or disappointed because they didn't necessarily receive the information they were looking for?

[Caroline Maynard]

Unfortunately, given how long it currently takes to process a complaint, I'm sure complainants are happy to receive a response. However, since they don't obtain the response until a year and a half or two years later, the information or records received may not be as relevant. My goal, then, is to reduce that response time so that people receive the information they are looking for when they request it.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

You said something interesting. Given how long the response times are, I'm wondering about cases where a complaint comes in a year after the information was initially requested and you know that it's going to be another five or six months before you get to the complaint. In those situations, are you able to check with the complainant to determine whether it's worth your while to review the file or whether you can simply close it to avoid unnecessary costs?

[Caroline Maynard]

We do that, of course, but it's unfortunate. I don't want things to get to that point. I don't want to have to call complainants to ask whether they still want the information in question since they asked for it eight months ago.

I'd like us to be able to call the complainant immediately to ask what information they are looking for exactly. Would they want the information right away if the institution were now willing to turn it over, in co-operation with our office? If not, or if we weren't able to deal with the file easily, the complainant might not obtain the information for two or three years, so they wouldn't be very satisfied.

In cases like that, it's important to have the co-operation of not just the institution, but also the complainant.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Thanks very much. I appreciate your remarks here today and I do hope that the Senate heeds your call for accepting amendments. Only government would think it's a good idea to have three complaint processes in place under one institution.

We have a number of votes here on the main estimates.

OFFICE OF THE COMMISSIONER OF LOBBYING

Vote 1—Program expenditures..........$4,086,292

(Vote 1 agreed to)

OFFICE OF THE CONFLICT OF INTEREST AND ETHICS COMMISSIONER

Vote 1—Program expenditures..........$6,134,141

(Vote 1 agreed to)

OFFICE OF THE SENATE ETHICS OFFICER

Vote 1—Program expenditures..........$1,214,777

(Vote 1 agreed to)

OFFICES OF THE INFORMATION AND PRIVACY COMMISSIONERS OF CANADA

Vote 1—Program expenditures..........$10,127,084

Vote 5—Program expenditures..........$22,693,992

(Votes 1 and 5 agreed to)