Evidence of meeting #74 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was expenses.
A video is available from Parliament.
Acting Vice-President, Corporate Affairs Branch, Canada Border Services Agency
Very much so.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
I think she has to do the work of looking at it from two perspectives: one from that of the public seeking information, and one from the government trying to fulfill the information.
Acting Vice-President, Corporate Affairs Branch, Canada Border Services Agency
For sure.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Other than the ministers, I think you're the first panel we've had—maybe there have been others I missed—that like this bill. Very few who use access to information to seek information from government like this legislation at all; maybe they can find a few worthwhile nuggets.
With the little time I have left, I'm trying to stick to particulars. I can only work in specifics. You're dealing with migrants coming across the border. Right now we're setting up winterized trailers or something for them. If you offered advice to the minister, would it shield him from Bill C-58? If you said you think the cost estimate is going to be $100 million to set up a bunch of trailers and you provided that as advice to the minister under the current legislation, is that shielded from a future ATIP request?
Acting Vice-President, Corporate Affairs Branch, Canada Border Services Agency
The proposal to undertake certain—
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Yes. Suppose I'm in your department and I'm looking at contracts to set up winterized trailers—
Acting Vice-President, Corporate Affairs Branch, Canada Border Services Agency
Contracts are public information, so that's proactively disclosed every quarter.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
I'm dealing back and forth with the minister's office on options A, B, and C. As soon as I provide that as advice to the minister, what happens to that information, that correspondence?
Acting Vice-President, Corporate Affairs Branch, Canada Border Services Agency
Part of it may be advice—I don't know, Dan, if you want to speak to section 21—and then the government or the minister or the department takes a decision. The decision is part of the public record, but it may be that the advice that was provided by officials had various options, and that may not be made public under the section 21 provisions.
Director, Access to Information and Privacy Division, Canada Border Services Agency
Most of the exemptions in legislation are discretionary. We go through the exercise of discretion. We have a look at what's being requested and when it's being requested. Has the plan been implemented? Are they just putting numbers back and forth? Is it a final decision? Then you make a decision based on your exercise of discretion at the time the request is submitted.
Timing is everything. You can request something today and be denied, and then request it next week and be given full access, so it also depends on what moment the ATIP request comes into the institution.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
That would be helpful. I hope we get to explore that difference about timing.
Director, Access to Information and Privacy Division, Canada Border Services Agency
Yes, timing is everything with an ATIP request.
NDP
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
That's your time, speaking of time.
Next up, for seven minutes, is MP Saini.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Thank you very much for being here.
I think there's been a lot of discussion about duty to assist, so I would like some clarity from you in what it means for those people who try to seek information under Bill C-58. For procedural purposes, because I have never filled out an access to information request, could both departments take me through the procedure step by step, including how you receive the request, how you evaluate the request, and where you intercede to provide a duty to assist, so I can understand how the whole process works from beginning to end?
Acting Vice-President, Corporate Affairs Branch, Canada Border Services Agency
Those are two perfect questions for Dan Proulx to answer, as director of ATIP.
Director, Access to Information and Privacy Division, Canada Border Services Agency
Generally speaking, how it works is that we get receipt of a request. They now come in at night with the online portals. Once we get a request, the front-end staff—in most ATIP shops you have an administrative staff—will log the request into the ATIP tracking system, which is the software we talked about earlier. The request is logged in to the system, and then it moves over to a pod, if you will. All the new requests that came in the day before, the night before, are sitting in this pod. There are a couple of hundred of them on any given day in our institution.
What happens then is that management assigns them to the analysts. They're farmed out. We have about 40-odd analysts that respond to these requests, and the requests go to them. The first thing to do when you get one of these new requests is read it and make sure you understand it. If you do not understand the request, you go back and seek clarification right away. We will not task it out within the CBSA to do a record retrieval if we don't understand it ourselves.
When we look at the subject of a request, one of the first things we do is query our system to see if someone else has requested something similar. As you know, we put the subject lines of completed requests on the Internet. If I processed a similar request in the past, I can offer that up as a request that can satisfy your immediate needs, or maybe something that can help you out in the interim as I process your new request for similar information. That is also done, because if we can satisfy you by giving you something we've given someone else without having to process the whole request, we save everyone time. You're happy and we're happy. Everyone's happy.
Once we understand the request properly, we have this initial 30-day window to make a lot of decisions. In that 30-day window I have to guess, often without even having the records, what's going to be coming my way. Am I going to need third party consultations? Am I going to have to consult other government institutions? What are my indications of the volume that I'm going to receive? A lot of that is done by phone with the program area that has the physical records. You try to guesstimate what's coming through the pipe, because if you don't take your time extension within the first 30 days, you can't take it. That's your window.
You may be lucky enough to get the information within the first 30 days. At CBSA they come by way of a drop zone. To expedite the processing, we created an online drop zone. The records are electronically put into a portal and they're grabbed by my staff. CBSA is fully automated; we don't have paper. If we receive paper, we scan it, and then we shred the paper. Everything moves in a system.
Once we get the information back to us, to make sure that we have good, solid recommendations, that we have what's being requested—not more, not less—and that we have a thorough review of what's coming my way before I do an ATIP analysis, we have a mandatory process whereby an executive level director or above at the CBSA needs to sign off that what is being requested is included in ATIP. It's complete. It's accurate. It's not too much. It's not too little. Here are the sensitivity recommendations or the recommendation to do a full disclosure. Those files are then assigned to an ATIP analyst.
A lot of folks say, “Can you process this in 30 days?” To give you an idea of the volumes right now, currently at ATIP CBSA my folks have between 80 and 100 files each. Every single day when they arrive in the morning, they have about 80 to 100 to juggle, with an expectation to either get it out the door in 30 days or to make the determination within 30 days of whether an extension is needed and how long it needs to be. You can see it's a very, very heavy workload, and everything is done very quickly, in time, in my office.
When you get that all back, to finish the process you have to do a line-by-line review. Seriously, it's a line-by-line review. Most of the exemptions, as I told you, are discretionary, so you have to ask yourself whether this is something that I can release to the public. Is it something I need to exempt? If I exempt it and it's a discretionary exemption, how do I exercise my discretion? How do I document it? Why am I choosing to release or not release? We'll document the exercise of discretion both ways. If we do a disclosure, we'll document why we're doing a disclosure. If we don't, we'll document why.
Once this is all done, it has to go to a delegated person. The Minister of Public Safety has delegated certain individuals to sign off on ATIP requests. The lowest delegation at CBSA is a team leader; most are signed by them. They will do a cursory review of the line-by-line review that is done by the analysis, to make sure that everything was done properly and everything's sustainable in law. Then they sign off.
To close, at CBSA all true access requests—those are non-personal access requests—come to me from the delegated team leader for a quick review to make sure that everything was done properly. Then I give them the go-ahead and it's disclosed.
Director, Access to Information and Privacy Division, Canada Border Services Agency
Just that. On any given day, we have about 3,000 on the floor.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Obviously, you can appreciate that we want to make life a bit easier, so we want to create proactive disclosure in general. I'm thinking of the Pareto principle and its 80/20 rule. Over the course of time, when you have a decent sample size.... You mentioned you had 11,600 on the privacy side and 6,250 on the information side, so obviously there are 18,000 or 19,000 requests per year ongoing. You must find, after a certain amount of time, that you have very similar requests coming in.
Would proactively disclosing that information free up more of your resources to deal with those people whose requests are very specific and very directly targeted?
Director, Access to Information and Privacy Division, Canada Border Services Agency
Yes.
In Robert Mundie's opening remarks, he talked about the traveller history report. That is a report that is highly utilized by IRCC, our colleagues here, to help them do a determination for citizenship applications. People come to CBSA ATIP to request a copy of their traveller history report about 12,000 times a year. That costs me about 10 FTEs or $800,000 out of my salary in order to respond. Those traveller history reports are given to these ATIP requesters, who are also citizen applicants, and they submit them as proof of how long they've been in the country.
That is the highest volume of common requests that we have. We have worked with our colleagues at IRCC—
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Sorry, but we are out of time. Thank you.
Go ahead, Mr. Gourde, for five minutes.
October 30th, 2017 / 4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lévis—Lotbinière, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
These 12,000 requests submitted consistently to your department; are they similar? You say that people mostly want to know the date they entered Canada. Is there no document that they could keep that would indicate that? Do these requests keep coming up and overload the system?