Once upon a time they were together and had a common administrative service, from 1983 until about 2001—if my memory serves me correctly, though I could be off by a year or two. There was one director for corporate services, one director for human resources, and we were looking at a relatively small organization. If you look at the organization now, they've been separated since then, with each having a director of corporate administration. That's expensive, particularly having somebody at the EX-03 level to look at an organization made up of 100 people. I once was a director general of corporate services at the EX-01 level at the Department of National Defence, having a staff of 800 people. Somehow there's a disconnect there. There are also personnel savings. Between the two organizations, you've got 25 lawyers. Should they not be in a central office where there is a call for more services, more advice, more whatever as a common share? It's being done at the moment with the court administration service, with one shared common administrative service for the Federal Court of Appeal, the Tax Court, and the Court Martial Appeal Court.
I'm not looking at reducing the complement of people. I'm looking at somehow making savings, and with any savings out of this, to transform them into investigators. Why? The current backlog is two years. I have complaints that have been with the Information Commissioner for the past six to seven years. The Privacy Commissioner is exactly the same. The sole task of both offices is to investigate complaints. That's it—and then to do the job. I question why each one of those two offices has less than 50% of their staff interested and employed in the investigation of complaints. It should be 75% or 80%. When I complain—and it's only 1,600 of those, of the 78,000—if I don't get an answer to my complaint, then even if the complaint was ruled against, I cannot go to court. I cannot exercise my right to go to court until I receive a report from the commissioner. I begged, on behalf of my clients, give me a report, tell me my complaint is not founded so I could go to court.
We have in fact a system that is not only broken but is stale and doesn't move. One of the ways to do it...unless you look at the organization of that commission and you make certain the only thing they're responsible for is not to propose reform to the act, but to investigate complaints, and to give them the task of doing that and the staff to do it.