As you know, culture takes a very long time to change. We definitely need more serious leaders with directions to their people, to their public servants, to disclose by default, as you say. We need a more robust legislation. We need to reduce the impact of some sections.
Some of the exemptions, such as section 21 on “advice or recommendations”, are overly used and abused throughout the government, because anything is advice and anything is a recommendation, but really, the fact findings.... There are so many things that we can release on those documents where section 21 is being used. That's one of the recommendations I made in my submission to TBS. Section 21 definitely needs to be limited to the very specific cases so that the institution does not have the discretion anymore. They have to apply the act as it is.
There are ways to make the act more specific and less easy to interpret. It's supposed to be more specific.
We also need to encourage discretion. The use of discretion for legal opinions, for example, is really rarely used. Even if the legal opinion was written 60 years ago.... Sometimes I'm questioning whether it is really important still to protect that document at this time, but it's very difficult for me to say to a minister, “Your use of discretion is not reasonable.”
We have to look at the facts. We have to look at the public interest. That's another thing that the act doesn't really provide. The information we are hiding, should it be released because there's a public interest element to it...?