Information & Ethics Committee on May 10th, 2016

[Jennifer Dawson]

I apologize. Does the information you have relate to the Treasury Board Secretariat's performance as a department with regard to access to information?

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Yes.

[Jennifer Dawson]

I am with the chief information officer branch, so I'm working on information management across the Government of Canada, but I'm not involved in the delivery of the access to information services for TBS as a department. I can only speak in general terms, in terms of what the trends might be across government, and I'm not as familiar with—

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Sure. You can speak in general terms. That's fine.

[Jennifer Dawson]

Really, when a department seeks an extension past 30 days, it should be able to demonstrate that there are a very large number of records or that the scale of the research involved is so significant that it's disruptive to operations.

Consultations with other institutions or third parties implicated in the records would be another significant contributor to requests for extensions.

In the case of TBS as a central agency, for example, I know that in my own work there is an awful lot that we do with third parties that are partners in many of our efforts, such as provinces and territories and other external bodies.

I don't know the specifics of TBS as a department, but I would anticipate that some of the extensions that are required are likely associated with third-party consultation.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

One of the comments I read last night was that commercial or government-sensitive information is a reason for the delays.

Proactive disclosure was mentioned by one of my colleagues. Can you give me your thoughts on how proactive disclosure is going to drop that number from down 55%?

[Jennifer Dawson]

One of the things we know through consultations around the open government action plan is that there is a high degree of interest in proactive disclosure of financial information in terms of government performance.

Currently, government provides proactive disclosure of any contracts that are over $10,000. What we've been looking to do is centralize that information so that it's available in one place, through the open government portal, rather than having each department report on its own contracts and seekers of that information having to look in many different places.

If we can make it easier for people to self-serve on information that they're interested in, hopefully we can reduce requests at the front end so that they don't even come in that way.

Commercial sensitivity is important, though, because when companies are doing business with us, they need to know that the competitive rates they're offering aren't available to their competitors or that their unique approach in delivering a service isn't exposed either. When we're applying exemption under the act for commercial sensitivity, we're typically looking at removing just the part of the information that might reveal, for example, what their rate was, so that they're not in a position where their competitiveness is undercut by the information we're revealing.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

That's pretty much it anyway. We have only about 10 seconds left. I appreciate the bright, but not too loud, questions you had there, Mr. Long.

We now move to Mr. Kelly for five minutes.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Thank you.

I will address this to either Ms. Dawson or Madam Paquet.

We heard from many witnesses before the committee that the concept of open-by-default government ought to diminish the number of ATIP requests you receive. If information is open, if there's proactive disclosure, then people wouldn't need to resort to an ATIP request to get the information you receive.

What's behind this? Is this just intuition? Is it possible that the additional posting or publishing of information may whet public appetite for more information? What is the thought behind this? What do you think the effect will be of proactive publication and the open-by-default initiatives?

[Jennifer Dawson]

I'll speak to that.

In terms of open by default, I think it's important to recognize that there will always be some information that isn't open, for example because we need to protect it for reasons of privacy, and there are other sensitivities, security being another obvious one. It's not that every document can always be open.

I see it very much as a service. There's information that government has created that was funded by Canadians and could be of use to them, but not everything we have is of use. Some of it is transitory and it's barely of use to us. Other information, though, has a real public value to it.

To the extent that we can be leaning towards openness and thinking about useful information that Canadians have funded and that can be shared, making that information available can have a positive benefit by reducing requests to the government for specific pieces of information.

What we need to do is be analytical in our approach. We need to look at what kind of information our individuals or businesses or others are requesting and how we can make the connection between that and our early efforts in sharing information. We can't share all of it all at once. We do need to be strategic in terms of making sure we're moving to greater openness, that we're leaning towards asking ourselves “Why can't it be shared?” instead of why it shouldn't be shared, and over time making more and more available, but doing it in a way that's responsive to what people are interested in.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

The assertion that more open government will diminish the number of ATIP requests is more an instinctive guess than a—

[Jennifer Dawson]

There's a clear correlation in some areas, and not so much in others. It depends. Some access to information requests are from individuals who are seeking case files because they want to know how their case is being treated and where it is in the system. If we can, for example, improve service delivery—which is another topic as well—so that the clients we're serving have a better sense of how their file is processing, that's another way to reduce access to information requests.

There are many different ways to come at this. Again, as in the example I used earlier, if we know that we get a recurring type of request, we should plan to facilitate it. We should be anticipating in our design processes right at the beginning that this is the type of information that would be requested. We could flag this as not having any issues for sharing, so it could go right out the door informally.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

We'll move to our last questions, and that will take us pretty much right to the end.

Mr. Bratina.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thank you.

We heard from Sweden, and they have one day to put the information out. Our number is 30.

What would it take if we told you that tomorrow you have to do it in a day? What would be the impact on the assets required to do that right now? Is that a fair question? Could you quantify that for us?

[Jennifer Dawson]

I think the evidence right now is that we're challenged to meet the 30-day deadline that we have. I believe about 61% of the requests are currently meeting the 30-day standard. It is difficult for me to imagine precisely how we would move to a one-day turnaround under our current processes.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

It would be huge, though, wouldn't it?

[Jennifer Dawson]

Yes, it would.

We've talked a lot this morning about improving access to technology that helps us to be well organized to respond to requests. We've talked a little bit about planning to be open from the beginning of the creation of information so that we don't need to screen it as much at the end of a review process, which also can be quite time-consuming. We've also been talking about being proactive.

All of those things would get us closer, but I am personally challenged to imagine very quickly getting from where we are today to a one-day turnaround.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Right. It's like security cameras. You can have a million of them, but if nobody's monitoring them, then it doesn't help.

We'll have to use all of the information that we've been discussing, such as the proactive approach and even culture change, in terms of inspiring people to dig this stuff up.

What can you say about the integrity of the GCDOCS system in terms of back-up or emergencies? Is there much that you can tell the committee about the security and integrity of the system?

[Sarah Paquet]

As it was designed, the system is working well. We have tested it to make sure that it responds to the demand in the way we want. A number of procedures are in place for granting access permissions. This may involve public access for everyone or more confidential information. Our permission allocation structure is a good one and operates robustly within the system.

As for the infrastructure support we receive from Shared Services Canada, we want to add to it this year in order to provide a very quick system of information retrieval and availability. Currently, departments have different continuity plans and parallel systems for their information. In fact, if there were a short-term service interruption, that is how we would operate. However, in the event of a longer interruption, we would really have to use daily back-ups that we could recover the information.

In the next year, working in collaboration with our partner, Shared Services Canada, we really want to have an environment that would mirror the one we currently have in the event of an interruption. This is what we call enhanced readiness. We also want a system that would be able to gather information from another source, if ever a data centre cannot provide it.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thanks very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Thank you.

Colleagues, we have a few minutes left. If I may, I would just like to ask one question.

It goes back to the directives that were issued by the President of the Treasury Board. We can do one of two things. We can make recommendations in one of two ways. Either we can have a very robust piece of legislation that clearly is very prescriptive in how things should happen, or we can have very loosely defined legislation and then, through the regulatory process, allow ourselves to be more nimble.

The nature of my question comes from the discussions that we've had at this committee on recommendations about such things as possibly opening up access to information requests to foreign countries and to individuals from outside Canada and so on. The legislative process is not nimble. The regulatory process is more nimble, but even that is not nimble.

In your experiences as individuals who are working very hard on behalf of Canadians, what are your personal opinions on what would be a better approach? Should we have broader overarching legislation that is highly dependent upon a regulatory framework, or should we actually have a very prescriptive legislative framework?

[Jennifer Dawson]

I think a regulatory framework can provide a more nimble approach to adapting in a fast-moving area, but what's also important is ensuring that the regulations are reviewed and kept up to date. I speak of that because we have existing regulations that are not reflective of today's technology, particularly in terms of their fee structure. I think an aspect of what we do has to be ensuring that this is kept evergreen and evolving as we move forward.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Good.

Thank you very much, Ms. Dawson, Ms. Paquet, and Mr. Fradette, for coming today, and thank you for the hard work you do on behalf of service to Canadians.

I'm going to ask colleagues to be very efficient and our witnesses to be very efficient. We have the commissioners coming in, and we only have an hour left to go through some very serious business that we have to do insofar as estimates are concerned.

We thank you very much for your time today.

We'll suspend for a minute.

[The Chair, Conservative, Blaine Calkins]

Colleagues, we have to proceed. We're running out of time this morning. We have very urgent business in regard to the main estimates pursuant to Standing Order 84(1), and we have to get to some votes.

We're very pleased to have with us this morning, from the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada, Madame Suzanne Legault, who is the commissioner. She has with her Layla Michaud, acting assistant commissioner, and Nancy Bélanger, general counsel and director of legal services.

We also have with us, from the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying, our commissioner, Karen Shepherd. With her is Mr. René Leblanc, deputy commissioner and chief financial officer.

Commissioners, I'll start in the order which I announced you, so I'll start with Madam Legault and move to Madam Shepherd. We'll have opening comments for up to 10 minutes and then proceed to questioning.

If we do it right, we should be able to get in two rounds of questions and then have enough time for the votes.

Please go ahead, Madame Legault.