In our department, and I think in all departments.... There was a court case a while ago, in 1999, that looked at what was covered in ministers' offices. We take a two-step approach in looking at what's covered. In ministers' offices, there are ministers' offices exempt staff, and basically we look at whether the contents of whatever is in the record relate to some kind of departmental matter, such as, for example, some kind of program that the department is working on.
That's one test for us: is it a record that would be covered by access to information? The second is, could a senior official of the government reasonably expect to obtain such a record? If those two tests are met, we would say that a record would reasonably be accessible or part of ATIP. This is something that we've worked on with our ministers' offices, but that's in the current act.