In my brief I've given you an outline, which I obtained via an access request, of the staff and its composition. When I come up with 28 investigators and 14 lawyers being in the access to information office, I consider them to be the front end, the people who actually conduct the investigation and render a decision. The rest of the staff, some 52, are administrators such as the director of personnel, director of media relations, director of human resources, and directors general of this and that. In any business, and this is a business, you want to have your front end, your operating end, in military terms your bayonets, to be more.... It's the tail versus the tooth type of ratio.
I find that either there's something I'm not understanding, or it's something that is so complex that you need this number of administrators.
I make the point that my co-author, Maître Racicot, was in fact at the information office from 2001 to 2007. When I asked him how many lawyers were there then, there were four, and the same number of complaints that there are today. Now they have 14.
We can lawyer ourselves up to the point where.... The backlog now is two years or more. I think it should be two months or more. We should measure it in months, if you're going to have the right of access and give it some meaning.
It's faster to go to the Federal Court now and get a hearing on the judicial review—it takes me nine months—than it is to complain to the Information Commissioner. So that system doesn't work.
Hence, I'm asking the Auditor General to look at it and give us some advice.