Thank you very much for asking us of The Canadian Press to appear before your committee.
Here is a little about who we are. We're celebrating our 100th anniversary this year. We provide news and reporting from across Canada on all platforms to almost every daily newspaper and broadcaster, as well as to numerous corporations and government departments. In Ottawa, we are a team of about 20 French and English reporters, editors, and photographers.
Access to information is a crucial tool for us, and we are very anxious about the government's attempts to improve transparency and accountability. We spend about $7,500 a year, give or take, on requests, until the price was dropped recently. Even now we're on track to spend about that much this year. It's one area in which we have not cut back in terms of expenses.
Just to give you an idea about how important it is to us, it is very central to what we do every day. Familiarity with the Access to Information Act is a basic requirement for anyone who wants to work in our bureau.
We've had a lot of successes over the years in using the act for our common goal, which I think is to provoke national debate on public policy. The use of tasers by the RCMP, initial indications that the number of missing and murdered aboriginal women was more than just a coincidence, crucial information about Afghan detainees, and the sponsorship scandal are all stories that we not only broke but enhanced through our use of access to information. They are important, weighty stories that have changed Canadians' perception of how their country works.
We also used the act to expose the fact that the former international development minister, Bev Oda, spent $16 on a glass of orange juice, and that the former foreign affairs minister, John Baird, ordered unilingual gold-plated business cards.
You could argue that those are examples of frivolous requests, or you could argue that they gave Canadians important indications of the culture within cabinet and how cabinet ministers are treating taxpayers' dollars. Bev Oda had to resign over that story, so what is considered frivolous and vexatious is very much in the eye of the beholder and a very nebulous and subjective concept.
We are increasingly forced to rely on the Access to Information Act for basic facts that support or explain government policy, but there was a time when we could ask a bureaucrat or a politician for an explanation about just why we were heading in a certain direction. I'll give you an example from last year, when the government was moving to expand the Canada pension plan. It was only through the act that we were able to fully document why the government thought such a move was necessary—just basic facts. After the expansion was announced it was only through ATIP a year later that we were able to say exactly how much extra money the CPP Investment Board would have to invest. These are basic facts that should be readily available, but aren't.
Despite our successes in using the act, it's also a constant source of frustration for our reporters. Sometimes we wait years for the government to get back to us with documents. Frequently the documents we do get back have so much blacked out that they make almost no sense. That leads to a problem in and of itself. Especially when a reporter spends so much time digging into an issue and gets back a pile of documents that are all blacked out, there is a temptation to write something, a temptation to connect dots that perhaps shouldn't be connected. We try very hard not to do that, but it is a risk. Similarly, exemptions for cabinet confidence or advice to ministers are so pervasive that we suspect they're used cavalierly.
Consistency is another issue. For example, we ask routinely for lists of briefings. Sometimes we receive full lists with some information blacked out. Other times we receive only a partial list, but when MPs ask for the same thing through Order Paper questions, for example, they will get different responses altogether. They are usually more extensive and come much faster. We double up and do both, but it is baffling that they're different.
We're a bit alarmed when we look at the proposals on the table here and we see more ways for the government to turn us down and deny us information.
The requirement to meet three criteria for every request is detrimental to the goal of understanding government and reporting on policy. By requiring users of the act to know exactly what type of record they're looking for, on what subject matter, and during a specific time frame, the legislation would effectively eliminate many of our more general queries and attempts to find out what is actually going on within government. Only in rare cases do we know with that kind of detail what we are looking for, and even in those cases we would depend on a leak from within government, telling us to look for a certain specific document.
We're also concerned about the move toward proactive disclosure. As a matter of principle, we are always in favour of the government disclosing more information. However, in this case, there is often either no fixed timeline or the timelines are longer than the ones we face under the existing legislation. Also, with proactive disclosure it's the government that decides what will be disclosed, shutting out the ability of citizens to assert their own demands to know and understand what the government is up to. If proactive disclosure were backed up by the act, and ministers and departments were to understand that if they did not follow the disclosure rules there would be consequences through the Information Commissioner, then proactive disclosures would be far more meaningful.
Finally, we're concerned that the bill does not apply to ministers, MPs, senators, and the courts, as initially proposed. The government has promised repeatedly to be open by default, yet the bill does not allow for any further citizen-driven insights into these very important and influential offices.
We're intrigued with the measures that are proposed for the order-making powers, but as we read the bill, we suspect the Information Commissioner's new powers would be curtailed by the courts, and we take to heart her own testimony on this subject.
Your committee is doing very important work that will have a large influence on the quality of our own reporting in the future.
I was only asked to appear here on Friday, so I have a lot of information back in the office that I can share with you later. If you want some things in more detail, I'd be pleased to provide that. Besides that, I'd be pleased to take your questions.