If I can be blunt for a moment, and I think it's my task to be so, your predecessors in office, going back a long time, under the Joe Clark government in 1979, listened and had a green paper on access, and they looked at various options including order-giving. On the other end of the scale, they looked at the ombudsman version, which they called the parliamentary option. Why? They wanted to hold a minister responsible to the House, to the public, and to the taxpayer for the effective use of access, and to be accountable before this committee. Under the act, the commissioner is in fact a commissioner, a mediator, an ombudsman.
We use the Swedish model and it has served us well. I have spoken with Mr. Clark and Francis Fox, the then minister of communications in 1980, responsible for the introduction of the original act, for bringing it through the House, and for eventually having it enacted into law in 1983. That's the way our system has been. It's kind of mediation, and the Information Commissioner only investigates complaints reported to this department annually and to this committee as often as is required in order to keep public pressure upon the decision-makers, the decision-makers being the ministers.
This committee has played a huge role throughout the years, a huge role in the creation of access to information back in 1983. I've spoken to each one of the commissioners from the past to the present. To change that would change the mechanism, would change the relationship. The commissioner would no longer come here and report to you. You would no longer play the role that you are, by definition in the act, supposed to play. When she becomes a judicial officer, as is the case in Quebec, she will no longer conduct the investigations that are being done now. It will be a judicial process with each party submitting in writing or verbally. In Quebec you come before the committee after you submit your complaint. You travel to Montreal, you go before the committee, you hire yourself a lawyer, and you make representation; then the commission issues a statement and issues a decision on it. If you're not happy, you go to court. Few people do, because the process is so long. I've represented corporations in the Quebec regime, and they decided to abandon their complaint halfway. Why? Because a year and a half afterward, they still hadn't been called before the committee. Is that what we want?
Have a look at the size of the Office of the Information Commissioner at the moment, the staff and the 14 lawyers they have and everything else. It's going to balloon even more. You will lose control, and you are going to read in The Globe and Mail about the decision being made, but you will have no sense and no control over which way the access to information ought to go.
I have one last comment. The comments being made by your leaders and in the budget are not the creation or the intellectual exercise of this committee, because you were not formed, or of the committee before. This is what many well-interested parties in the civilian society suggest, and the Information Commissioner suggests. I object to that. The Information Commissioner is there, as designed, to apply the act and apply the law as written, not to change it, not even to reform it.
I'm begging you, as elected representatives, on something as fundamental as a quasi-constitutional right. That's what the Supreme Court, the Federal Court of Appeal, and the Federal Court said. It's up to you to decide and to structure the law. You may want to restructure it. I encourage you to do that, but it should come from this committee. It should not come from people outside, let alone bureaucrats whose purpose it is to apply the law.