To be clear, I was actually referring to just simple requests for information from media and the public. We would phone up a communications officer, or we would have to go through a communications officer, in order to get information from the government. But to your point, yes, there certainly have been well-documented circumstances where there has been political interference or communications involvement in the access to information system, both at the provincial level and at the federal level.
That was actually highlighted by a colleague of mine, Ann Rees, whom I would commend to the committee as a potential witness. She's a professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver.
But yes, it is a significant problem. I'm not exactly sure how you fix that problem. There's always going to be, I think, the potential for improper involvement by political staff and communications staff in these kinds of processes.
To go back to your first point, I'm actually not certain that having a regular review process would assist this situation. As everyone in this room knows, as a result of party discipline within our political system, if the government does not want to do something, it will not do something. Yes, a regular review would provide an opportunity for this kind of forum for a review of the legislation, but changes are not going to be made unless government actually wants to make those changes. By the way, the lack of power that individual MPs experience under our system of government was one of the reasons why the Access to Information Act was put in place. Gerald Baldwin ran something called the “League to Restore Parliamentary Control”, and one of its mandates was actually to bring forward freedom of information legislation.