It did, but not to the same extent.
At the same time, the Information Commissioner received 10,000 complaints, as opposed to the 5,000 or 6,000 they would have in a normal year. You have a system that's bogged down at the federal institution level and the OIC.
Last year was a disaster year. It was basically that all parts of it were off. If you can take 52% of the requests and use a more administratively friendly request that doesn't have the kind of impediment, the kind of restrictions or the kind of exemptions that the access act has, it will bring it down to a more measurable level and something we can do.
That's my first recommendation. We can do this. I think they are working at the moment on a way to develop an alternative approach within that particular department. They should be pressed to do that.
My second recommendation—I'm trying to go through them quickly—is you should get the Auditor General to do a report. Each department basically begs for assistance—each ATIP section within a given department—from the deputy ministers in order to get sufficient resources to meet the volume of requests that they get year in, year out. In some cases, they are successful. In other cases, they have to line up, because the department is short of resources.
We—this committee, or even the OIC— have absolutely no idea at the collective level of what a fair number is or the type of people we need at each institution to handle the volume that we have. Through time, we'll come up with it.
I'm using the RCMP as a good case in point. They are grossly understaffed. As a result, as users, when we try to get access to records in the pursuit of sealed litigation or in the pursuit of interests of the clients who come to us, we have to line up for months, and sometimes for years, before we have it. If we get ahead of the queue, we're only displacing the problem someplace else.
I think the Auditor General ought to do a review, a system audit, to see whether or not we have an adequate number of people and to see what that number is.
Before we can impose upon each one of those ATIP coordinators the type of criticism we see in annual reports, and sometimes in the media and so on, that they're not doing their job.... I think they are doing as good a job as they can be permitted to do with the personnel that they have. As I've said, 70% of the requests are responded to within the established deadlines.
The third point is user fees. At the moment, one pays $5 to submit a request. That $5 amount was instituted back in 1983. In today's value, that's $15. To me, spending $90 million of public funds—this, of course, without any contributions from the users—is passé. I, as a frequent user, don't mind paying, because I'm getting a service for free at the moment. Not only am I getting a service for free, but in 2015, the then-government made the access regime much friendlier than it was. At the time, before 2015, you had to pay so much if your request generated more than five hours of access search time. If you had to pay for photocopies—