Information & Ethics Committee on Oct. 5th, 2022

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Then, following that, your recommendation was talking about good email management—good email hygiene, I think, would be the term—making sure that you would move from.... You know, if you were five in the office and you're all on an email chain, the person responsible should be the one who keeps it and keeps it in a place where it's referenced and can be easily found afterwards, and everybody else should delete the emails.

I'm just thinking practically. You're a public servant. No one wants to make a headline; no one wants to be on your bad side. Let's say that four of the five delete their emails, but maybe there was a cross-discussion that happened with one of those four. They didn't even think about it; they just erased their emails. When you come in and do an investigation, doesn't it look like they were hiding something or they were erasing information so that it wouldn't be there for an ATIP? Isn't that the uncharitable interpretation that could happen? Wouldn't that put amazing pressure on that individual public servant who, really, in good faith, thought that all the information was copied and that they were safe to eliminate that information?

[Caroline Maynard]

We have to make sure that the documents being saved have corporate value. The other thing we see is that there are conversations that have no corporate value.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

I'm guilty of that.

[Caroline Maynard]

Personal emails creep in sometimes too: “Are you coming for lunch?”

We have to make sure we capture what the discussion was about. You don't have to keep the emails if you go back and make a memo out of it that says, “We discussed this. This is what was taken into consideration, and this is the decision that was made.” The email is just a conversation. It's like having a meeting. You don't record the meeting; you record minutes at the end.

I understand what you're saying. Somebody could be worried about erasing something, but, again, you have to look at the chain and see what the corporate value is. Do you have to keep all of your emails about everything? No. There are things that would lead to somebody understanding a decision or why there's a policy change. If I see that four people discussed it, and you have the chain kept by at least one person, I don't see how I could be mad at the other three for doing proper management of information.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you for your answer, Ms. Maynard. It adds an important detail for the consideration of my colleagues.

Can you send us your guide for how to process information? At the least, it will be useful to committee members in producing our report.

[Caroline Maynard]

I will send you that.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

On that point, Mr. Chair, I am going to do the opposite of what my friend Mr. Bezan did, and cut my questions short in order to get back on schedule.

[The Chair, Conservative, Pat Kelly]

Thank you.

I was actually a bit sloppy with the clock there, so I wasn't certain.

Ms. Gill, the floor is yours for two and a half minutes.

[Marilène Gill, Bloc, Manicouagan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Maynard, you said that 60 per cent of access to information requests were made by the public. I imagine that the rest of the requests come from other sources such as elected representatives, or indigenous people, as Mr. Bains talked about earlier.

Would it be possible to do a study of the various sources of access requests? I know it would be very complex and the research required would be incredible, given the many supports that exist and the subjects and organizations to which requests relate. But it might let us know what has to be improved, to untie the knots or eliminate the bottlenecks you were talking about.

[Caroline Maynard]

In an access request, there is a place where people have the choice of whether or not to say they are a member of a particular group. Treasury Board, which is responsible for access requests, could add to the list of groups, obviously, if it considered it appropriate in the present circumstances.

Regarding bottlenecks, we see these more within institutions.

[Marilène Gill, Bloc, Manicouagan, QC]

Two and a half minutes go by very fast, so I am going to ask you my second question, which is about language, a subject you referred to earlier.

In some fields, particularly in translation and interpretation, it is hard to find workers. Is that an impediment to access to information for people who want to obtain information in French?

[Caroline Maynard]

Our statistics show that there are not huge numbers of complaints concerning the language in which documents are provided in response to access requests. It is very rare for people to complain about not getting a document in their language.

The impediment lies more in the area of proactive disclosure. Institutions will often say that they cannot publish a document because they would have to do it in both languages, but they do not have the resources needed for translating it. That is unfortunate, because if those documents were published automatically, there would be fewer access to information requests.

[Marilène Gill, Bloc, Manicouagan, QC]

Thank you, Ms. Maynard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Pat Kelly]

Thank you.

With that, for two and a half minutes, we now have Mr. Green.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

You contemplated the relationship between the solicitor and the client. I think about the recommendations of the former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, about separating out the Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General.

In your response to one of the questions around prosecuting the destruction of documents, what I'm curious to know is this: How many cases have you referred to the Attorney General for investigation?

[Caroline Maynard]

There have been about seven.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

How many were pursued?

[Caroline Maynard]

I don't have that information.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

On the face of it, it seems like there's a pretty significant inherent conflict of interest when the government is acting as both a solicitor and a client at the same time and when decisions on investigations of this nature are not handled with impartiality, particularly when you talk about the destruction of documents. I referenced the mess that's happening in the States and the sacrosanct way in which we should be maintaining government records. The government side wanted to attribute perhaps more benevolent reasons as to why these things might go missing.

To your knowledge, is there any way for this committee to be able to request the results of the seven cases referred to the Attorney General?

[Caroline Maynard]

You are welcome to ask him directly.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

In your opinion, do you think there could be a legal advantage, given your subject matter expertise around the law in this particular field, of decoupling the role of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to perhaps allow a bit more independence between the two? Or do you think that as it is now, status quo, it doesn't present any legal questions?

[Caroline Maynard]

My recommendation is to jump over the step of the Attorney General referral and go directly to the police force, who I believe would be better placed to do the investigation.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

But ultimately, an RCMP investigation would give a recommendation to a prosecutor, which would then, to my understanding, end up in the purview of the Department of Justice. We're right back to the same kind of.... I'll call it “grey area”, to be charitable to the government.

Mr. Chair, I know that my time is up, but I'm wondering if there's some way in which this committee, through its reflection on this testimony, can request from the Department of Justice and the Attorney General what happened to those seven cases and what their rationale is for not pursuing them for the criminality they were flagged for.

[The Chair, Conservative, Pat Kelly]

Thank you. That request is noted.

Commissioner Maynard, if you'd like to respond, you may, but it sounded like Mr. Green was making a document request.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'm not going to put you in those crosshairs.