In a former life I was executive secretary of National Defence headquarters. The coordinator of access to information worked for me, and I worked for the deputy ministers and the Chief of the Defence Staff and related on a daily basis with the chief of staff to the minister. Basically I was responsible for the access to information coordinator's staffing, her performance evaluation, and for giving her direction and receiving advice from her. But fundamentally she was down the totem pole quite a bit, and any of her work was sometimes supervised not only by a bureaucrat but also by someone from the minister's office itself. She has very little authority or independence to do what she knows to be the intent of the requester, the type of information the requester is after. She is an agent of that particular department. In some cases in some of those departments, her capacity to apply the law and to exempt or to exclude information is rather limited. She is being directed as to what to release and what not to release.
My point is that hers is absolutely a key position. Of 78,000 requests, only 1,600 are subject to a complaint. The only person a requester sees, contacts, and gets responses from is the coordinator. If that coordinator is not given the instrument to do her job—the authority to seek access to and release information—the system will never get off the ground. That's exactly the point.
In the Gomery inquiry—and there was another inquiry, but I forget which one—some of these coordinators came to the fore, particularly at the Gomery inquiry, and said how unstrung they were and how disciplined they were if they dared to provide the information a user was entitled to under the act. Hence, my point is to make these individuals, about 160 of them, Governor in Council appointments. They should be reporting to the minister. The minister ultimately should have political authority and political responsibility before Parliament and before this committee for his performance under the act. It's a quasi-constitutional right. One of the ways to do this is to give him the means to do it. Then the minister has no way to escape this, or say that he didn't know, wasn't aware, or didn't know what the ministry or the department did. He is responsible, and the person he charges and delegates to do the job for him is a Governor in Council appointment with the protection, independence, and the authority that comes with it.