My sense of the current system from my 10 years of experience as a parliamentarian is that if someone in the bureaucracy makes a mistake, for whatever reason—the way it's structured, the way rewards are set up, the way leadership and structure are set up—it's almost impossible for them to admit that they've made the mistake and make a correction. This is a cultural issue and this is what we're talking about.
When it comes to access to information, it seems to me that the culture of the bureaucracy is that we're going to say no to every request unless we find a reason to give out the information, whereas the culture should be that we're going to automatically say yes to everything and only find reasons to keep some information from being disclosed when it comes to some very specific reasons, as the Ambassador for Sweden pointed out. I think this would fix the problem of Canada, as Mr. Mendel pointed out, ranking 59th or whatever it is, and we would move upward in the world.
That would immediately take away all the stories of secrecy. These become the stories in the headlines. It's not about the content of the information usually, but the fact that somebody tried to cover it up. That's usually what the story is all about. Sunlight becomes the great purifier in this.
I think that's where our commissioner wants to go. To anybody here at the committee, do you think the recommendations she has put forward will take us in that direction?