Information & Ethics Committee on March 22nd, 2016

[Stefanie Beck]

I think the Treasury Board Secretariat, as my colleague has mentioned, is looking into all of those things. What is always best in terms of oversight—and I speak more generally here—is that those doing the oversight are very familiar with the source of the information and with the information they're looking at. Subject matter expertise makes a difference when you're performing an oversight function.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Surtees, are you able to comment on that question?

[Larry Surtees]

Not specifically, no, but in general. We also work very closely with the Information Commissioner to make sure that she and her team understand why we have done the things that we have done, and we do that as we work through complaints.

To me, the complaint process is not a problem. The complaint process is an attempt to identify areas that might need to be addressed in the future, and we welcome that. A review of the types of complaints and a review of the types of court cases would be very informative as to what the concerns are that citizens have with respect to the current act, if I may....

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

Thank you.

I'll go back to Deputy Minister Beck. Another of the Information Commissioner's recommendations is “that the government be required to consult with the Information Commissioner on all proposed legislation that potentially impacts access to information”. Do you agree with this recommendation?

[Stefanie Beck]

I'm sorry. On that one I just don't have enough information to be able to comment, and the secretariat would be coordinating for all of government.

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

Okay, fair enough.

I know that you've mentioned some of the recommendations, including recommendations 2.4, 2.3, and 4.15. Do you have any other recommendations for amending the act? Is there anything else that you'd like to see?

[Stefanie Beck]

We are in constant discussions with the secretariat over what we would like to see, because I think it's fair to say that we all have views on what we would like to see in the act, but what would apply well in my department is not necessarily something that would be useful across government.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

We'll move now to Mr. Kmiec for five minutes.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you very much to the witnesses for coming in today for a very fulsome discussion.

In a previous life, I was the registrar for the HR profession in Alberta. Access to information and ethical conduct of members were very important to us. I also wrote the code of ethics and the standards of professional conduct dealing with information like this, so I know that “category of employee” typically generates a lot more interest.

First, I have a question in regard to exempt staffers in ministers' offices. My question is for Ms. Empey and Mr. Surtees from National Defence.

For exempt staffers in a minister's office, for other emails, correspondence, and anything they might have communicated on with the department previous to their employment, anything between them and the department they're in, is that subject to an exemption? Or are they required to provide those emails and correspondence or documents?

[Kimberly Empey]

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.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I have a question to CIC about a very high volume of ATIP requests. You said that an increase of 16% to 20% annually is your forecast. I was doing just the rough math here, and that's $124.21 per ATIP, roughly speaking. That's just a business metric, and kind of crude, but I think it shows you what may happen.

You also mentioned that when a department has programs that change, you see an increase there. I know that with a new government there's a tendency to start changing programs, to introduce new things, and to eliminate old programs. As well, if you were to adopt this recommendation to allow anybody anywhere in the world this access, then an increase of 16% to 20% seems kind of conservative. What type of percentage increase would you expect if those two scenarios were to happen?

[Stefanie Beck]

As Michael referred to earlier, I think that if we were to have close to two million temporary visa requests a year, you can see right away that there will be a number in there. We even have people doing requests for information on visas that were accepted, because they want to know why they were accepted, inasmuch as they want to know why others were refused.

We regularly get requests from people in the business of immigration. They want to see our operational bulletins. They want to see how we make decisions so that they can better advise their clients. That's understandable. If those requests could come from anywhere around the globe, that could also be a source of increased requests.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I have a question for Mr. Surtees and Ms. Empey, on National Defence.

This is just a ballpark figure. I'm not looking for any specifics here. I know that you deal with a lot of information with regard to our allies and whatever operational theatre they're in. What do you think would be the cost to us, to our reputation or otherwise, if we were to inadvertently release a document that we weren't supposed to release? Whether it's in regard to the armour on our armoured personnel carriers or the electronics in our aircraft, what would be the ballpark figure for the damage?

[Larry Surtees]

We would put people's lives at risk. I don't think there's a higher damage that we could do. So it's very important that we do our job properly and that in the department we work with our colleagues and the department to make sure that we are doing the job properly to prevent that.

[Kimberly Empey]

That's what I think about every day: making sure that I keep our Canadian Armed Forces protected.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

We'll now move to Mr. Bratina.

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

These are both very positive presentations today, and I appreciate hearing them.

I have a couple of things, though, Ms. Beck, on the recommendation that institutions be allowed to refuse to process requests that are frivolous, vexatious, and so on. You're saying no, so what do you do with something that is obviously frivolous or vexatious? You must get them.

[Stefanie Beck]

Yes, we occasionally get what would be deemed frivolous and vexatious requests, and on those here's what we try to do. The ATIP analyst has permission, the right, to go back to the requester and try to clarify what the request is, particularly when they're asking for what looks like a fishing expedition, such as “I want every memo from the last six months or anything that starts with 'P'”. If we can go back and refine....

Often, I think it's what you referred to earlier, Mr. Chair, in that if we can put out more information proactively, then they won't be asking for it. The more we can put up online that's unclassified and that will not cause problems from a security perspective or a health and safety perspective, I think that's appropriate.

We certainly do see frivolous and vexatious requests, and they do take up a lot of time.

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

On the notion of the work that both of you do, this is a very stressful topic at the constituency level. There's stress when we get a letter from someone who is saying, “This is what they told me, so what do we do with this?” I really enjoyed the positive nature of the presentation, but what would you say to the level of stress? Where I'm aiming at is resources, so tell me about that.

[Stefanie Beck]

Overall, we accept far more applications than we refuse, so right away, you're only seeing a small percentage of those applicants, for either permanent immigration or temporary immigration. When that's all you see, that skews the perspective, and it seems that we spend our days saying no. We actually don't.

The other processes that we try to put into place are to beef up our call centre so that somebody is answering the telephone when the clients call and they can get information directly from a voice, instead of in an ATIP request when you do it online and you don't actually speak to anybody. Actually, we also have, as I think you know, a special phone line for members of Parliament to help with this, so that constituency offices can call in directly or email directly.

We've actually spent a lot of time over the last few months looking at how we can funnel all of the calls or emails, all of the client service approach, into one part of the department, so that we will have cohesion and consistency across the approach, by phone, or by email, or through ATIP, and as well so that people are getting the same responses, because we also find that there's some “answer-shopping”. If I try phoning, do an ATIP, and then if I get a lawyer, maybe I can get a different answer. Ideally, again, to come back to it, the more we can put out there up front, the more time it will save all of us later.

But some people just won't be happy, right? They got denied a visa.

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

Right.

[Michael Olsen]

Perhaps I could answer that as well.

We also want to understand better why people are making ATIP requests. Everybody has a different reason. They fall under broad categories. If we can understand better why people are making requests when they are making requests, we can more proactively respond, if you will, to those concerns up front.

It will take resources to understand better why they're making the request, but as we have a better understanding of that, we'll be able to address it and perhaps reduce, I hope, or even keep constant the number of requests we're getting.

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

Mr. Surtees, could you comment on this notion of the resources and workplace stress, in terms of what you do?

[Larry Surtees]

At Defence we are also looking at what we can put out proactively under open government. From our perspective, that moves the access to information workload to the front end of the exercise, because we still have to make sure that the document going forward complies with the law and that we take the exemptions.

Either way we have a fair amount of business to do, but most of it isn't of the same nature as the questions coming in to our colleagues. There's not as much stress on the specific individuals. We get a lot of requests from media and we get a lot of requests from organizations that are looking for information. We turn those around as quickly as we're able to so that it can be dealt with appropriately.

[Kimberly Empey]

Perhaps I could add to that.

In IRCC we do sometimes get requesters who are frequent requesters. Year-over-year fluctuations can see us with 10% coming from one requester. We do have that same thing, because at this point under the act, there is no limit to how many they can send in.