Information & Ethics Committee on May 14th, 2021

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you for that.

As you know, I'm nine years into a fight with the justice department over the political decisions that were made with the St. Anne's Indian Residential School, and we still haven't received those documents.

It seems that whenever you have a report, every year there are certain departments that tend to be outliers with less willingness to turn over information. Are you seeing a change? Do you deal in particular with departments that are troublesome to try to get them to comply with the law?

[Caroline Maynard]

Yes, when we see that an institution is definitely constantly behind and there does not seem to be any improvement, I have the authority to initiate my own investigation. In the last two years I have done one with the RCMP, because they were having some problems. There's IRCC right now, Immigration Canada, and I'll be tabling my special report soon. I started one with Library and Archives Canada recently as well, because they are definitely having some issues, especially with classified documents and the lack of a system to deal with those types of documents.

I do not hesitate to initiate a systemic investigation when we see that we can maybe help the institution find solutions that are outside the scope of one particular complaint.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I thank you for that. It is really important that you are able to make those systemic investigations, because I know that RCMP has come up a number of times with red flags for non-compliance or very slow responses, so I'm glad to see that.

I'm interested in the issue of the percentage of cases that are immigration cases for ATI. You mentioned something earlier on, and I want to drill deeper into that. Should we be setting up an alternative system so that people can get information on their immigration file and are not using the access to information system and burdening it down?

The access to information system, I believe, should be about getting political information and for journalists. It should be for getting a broader picture on the details of how government operates, as opposed to dealing with individual files that people need help with. Is there a better system for them to get help?

[Caroline Maynard]

I don't want to give the scoop of my report that's going to be tabled in the next two weeks, but definitely we're looking at how to better serve those clients and whether the access to information process is the proper system to give these people the information they need.

Immigration has tons of really good solutions and plans. It's just a question of resources, as it is for anybody else, and the timing of those solutions. You'll see in the report that we came up with a long list of things they can do to better serve these clients outside of access requests.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I'll just end on this: Do we need a policy decision so we can move it into another realm, or would your recommendations be enough?

[Caroline Maynard]

I think the recommendations will be a good start. Because I'm going to be tabling a special report, it's going to be up to the government to decide whether they want to push it further. Immigration Canada and the minister are definitely on board. They were collaborating during the investigation, so they know what they need to do.

Again, it's just a matter of resources and how long it's going to take.

[The Chair, Conservative, Chris Warkentin]

Thank you.

We're going to turn to Mr. Carrie now for the next five minutes.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the commissioner for your good work, particularly during the trying times we're all facing this year.

You mentioned something in your opening that I found quite interesting. You said that because of the pandemic, there have been some positive effects. As an example, you may not need further real estate and office space because of the efficiencies of people being able to work at home. I think [Technical difficulty—Editor] constituents and the people of Canada, the better it is.

I was just wondering if you are able to track these efficiencies. Can you give us an idea of how many more hours your employees are able to put towards complaints and resolution of issues?

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Marie-Hélène Gaudreau]

Mr. Chair is not here, but as the vice-chair, I want to tell you that the interpretation was interrupted.

Mr. Carrie, could you repeat what you said? We will check to see if the interpretation is working now.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Thank you very much. I have been having issues with the Internet today.

Commissioner, can you hear me?

[Caroline Maynard]

Now I can, yes. It was very choppy, so it was difficult to understand your questions.

I think you wanted to know if we have ways to find efficiencies or how we calculate the efficiencies that were gained during the pandemic from working from home.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Yes.

[Caroline Maynard]

It's not something we've done specifically. We made sure our files were still moving. We were not actually looking at particular tasks yet, because we were still adjusting to working from home.

As I said earlier, two years ago, the maximum my office was able to do was about 2,000 to 2,300 files per year. Last year we did over 5,000 cases, and this year it was 4,000 while working from home. I do believe we would have been able to do more if our institutions had been able to respond to our requests. We were often stopped in our steps forward because of the institutions' inability to work from home or their inability to respond to investigations because they didn't have the resources that we had in my office. When we saw that, we moved towards other files that were a little more complex or we reassigned files.

I think that in the next year we're going to see a huge improvement, because now the departments are all set up. They're working from home and have access to their files. A lot of them have also moved to digital documents instead of paper files. That is going to be really helpful in our investigations in the next year.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

You mentioned as well that you're now able to recruit across Canada, versus close to your office. Are there any government policies that are hindering your ability to recruit across the country?

[Caroline Maynard]

No. We do recruit across Canada normally, but because of the type of work we were doing before, we were requiring people to move to Ottawa because the work was all on paper files in our office. We didn't have this idea of doing an investigation from home. That's why I was saying earlier that the pandemic has opened our eyes to all these opportunities. A lot of people, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, who earlier had said they couldn't do this work from home were now forced to do it; and it worked.

Now we don't want to go back. We have to move forward and we have to see how well we've adapted. I think we will be allowing people to work from outside of the national capital region, because it's going to be easier. We can still meet them on Zoom.

The only difficulty is the training. It's a lot harder to train people through Zoom, especially for our applications and specific tasks. We still have some limits as well with respect to secret files, but generally I think we're going to be able to allow a lot more flexibility in that field in the future.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Thank you very much.

[Caroline Maynard]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Chris Warkentin]

Mr. Dong, we'll turn to you now for the next five minutes.

I do apologize, members. I was having a technical difficulty at the same time as Mr. Carrie. These are the challenges of working remotely, for sure. I'm sure everybody within the civil service is having similar experiences.

Mr. Dong, we'll turn to you for the next five minutes.

[Han Dong, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair. I want to thank the commissioner for being here today.

Commissioner, in your 2019-20 report, you mentioned the target for investigating referrals or complaints as 270 days, and roughly 60% of the time your office would be able to meet that target.

Help me to understand it a bit better. For the 270 days, how many days on average does a person need to wait to be assigned to a caseworker?

[Caroline Maynard]

It really depends, because we do now have an early investigation resolution team. Every file that comes in is reviewed by somebody with a lot of experience, and we assign the files that we know we can resolve quickly right away.

When the file is more complex, when it's a large file—we have files with 20,000 pages of documents to review—those are a little more difficult to assign quickly. It can go from one week to three months. We do still have older files, top secret and secret files, that are a lot more difficult to manage, but we are trying to do it within nine months. That's the goal.

[Han Dong, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

I'm asking these questions in the context of my constituency casework. In your opinion, would it be abnormal, unusual, to submit a complaint in November and still be waiting for it to be assigned in May? Is that normal or not?

[Caroline Maynard]

I hope not. We still have, as I said, 4,000 cases in our backlog, so one file out of 4,000 is sometimes.... We can't assign them all to our investigations. We have now 60 investigators. We're going to be hiring 21 more. I really hope, if you have a file like this, that you can contact our registry office and make sure that it's flagged to our team so we can assign it to somebody as quickly as possible.

[Han Dong, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

That's helpful. Thank you.

I want to change gears a little bit. If someone wants to request information about themselves from the government, in this case the employer, is it best to do that through the Access to Information Act or through the Privacy Act?

[Caroline Maynard]

It really depends on what the person is looking for. I've seen a lot of people doing it through both, because you don't get the same information when you ask for your own personal information through the Privacy Act. If you ask for information, you're going to get probably more information than just your own personal information. Usually it comes with a lot more. It really depends on what the person is looking for.

[Han Dong, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

Can you give some examples, some typical requests for either one of them?