Thank you very much, Ms. Fortier.
It’s not an easy file for a government; that’s why it took more than 30 years to modernize the Access to Information Act.
Our government is the first to give order-making powers to the Information Commissioner. This is significant progress. We’re the first to add ministerial offices and the Prime Minister’s Office to the act. Once again, this is progress. For the first time, the act applies to more than 240 federal agencies. That’s another positive development.
We’ll continue to raise the bar as far as openness and transparency are concerned. I hope that, in the future — especially with mandatory reviews every five years — we’ll continue to see progress, under this government and future ones.
In fact, it’s unacceptable that an act should not have been modernized in 34 years. That’s the reason why it was so important for us, as an opposition party and, later, as the government, to continue to make progress in order to better serve the population and to increase government’s openness and transparency.