Information & Ethics Committee on Nov. 21st, 2022

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you for that.

Now, with reference to Bill C-58, it allowed proactive disclosure of many pieces of information—tens of thousands, in fact—that previously required access to information requests to obtain. Do you believe that this has helped at all to make government more open and transparent for Canadians?

[Michael Wernick]

I left government three years ago, so I think you're in a better position to judge that based on the feedback.

I do think it is the model to be expanded to a much longer list of categories of information, and if information is getting to voters, taxpayers and citizens directly without intermediation, that's a good thing for the transparency and accountability of the federal government.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you.

I'll move on to Mr. LaPointe.

You've been an adjunct professor and executive in residence at the University of British Columbia since 2004 in the graduate school of journalism program. What do you teach your students about access to information in Canada and the role of journalists, if anything?

[Kirk LaPointe]

I teach them to develop patience, to be further accepting of rejection as part of the craft. What I try to teach them is that it is still an important pursuit. I believe that it is one of the more sophisticated ways in order to do your research, because you're really depending on the actual official records. You're not depending on someone's interpretation of them or anecdotal comments. You're not just chatting up somebody in order to get an opinion on what it is that's going on. You're actually dealing with that.

I teach them to be applied, but I will say that year after year, in the course of the three hours, we actually file requests with them, and in I guess the dozen or so years that I've been doing this exercise, I've yet to see one of them come back in anything less than about 90 days and with anything approaching something that we could convert into a story.

It's a frustrating thing. I think a lot of my students are “one and done” with ATI. That is a great regret.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Further to that, in this era of misinformation, disinformation and maybe how it's important to be first in getting the information out, have delays in ATI possibly contributed to journalists not being able to get the most accurate information out?

[Kirk LaPointe]

Well, I think that's true, because I think we're dependent on the interpretation of the information providers in the interim, before you see the official record.

I will say that where our craft makes its mistake is that we cover too much and uncover too little. Access to information is a way to uncover things. I don't mean that in a nasty or harsh way. I think it really does provide some kind of disclosure of important information, and I don't think journalism does that often enough. I think one of the reasons has to do with the complexity of this law and the fact that it is very difficult to use. As I said earlier, it's a better instrument of history than it is of journalism.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

I think Mr. Wernick talked about other jurisdictions. You also mentioned Germany, but are there other areas, other jurisdictions, that we can learn from that may be doing this better in a way?

[Kirk LaPointe]

Well, I think Canada now has been ranked, in the last survey I saw somewhere, around 57th or 58th in the world, so it's—

[Michael Wernick]

No. That's not right.

[Kirk LaPointe]

Is that not right? What is the number? I haven't seen the latest world ranking.

[Michael Wernick]

I'm sorry, but I actually think that's a good answer to the question, which is that you should go to some of the international ranking scores. I could send the committee a list of them.

In a ranking of the most transparent countries by U.S. News & World Report, Canada was second out of 85 countries. Open Data Watch ranked Canada 15th. The rule of law index from the World Justice Project ranks Canada 13th out of 140 on open government. That's not to be complacent. We should aim to be ahead.

I did look at all of these over the weekend, and the countries that are ahead of Canada on transparency are basically the Nordic countries, New Zealand and Switzerland. If you go to some of those international rankings, you'll find examples to follow. Most of them are small unitary states without significant provinces, but that may be an anomaly.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Okay. Thank you, Mr. Wernick.

Mr. LaPointe, you can make a final thought, if you'd like.

[Kirk LaPointe]

Yes, I was going by the global right to information rating, and in the last one I have, which is from 2019, Canada was ranked 57th.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, sir.

All right. That completes the second round of questioning. We are going to go to the third round. As I mentioned, it will be five minutes for the two sides and then two and a half, if that's okay.

I think that's going to be the last round of questions. We've received a lot of information.

In the absence of my colleague, Mr. Kurek, having any questions, I'm going to take the liberty of asking a question.

Mr. Wernick, you said earlier that the records management system is scattered across 300 organizations. You spoke about digitizing and catching up on that. I can certainly speak to that in my role as veterans affairs critic and how difficult it is to transfer documents from active service to Veterans Affairs. Oftentimes, we were told that there was no digitization of those documents and that they would actually have to go to the national archives and grab the information on paper to determine whether an injury, for example, was attributed to service.

You also mentioned that it was very expensive and labour intensive. Just how expensive and how labour intensive would that be, and how much of a necessity is it? I'm seeking your guidance on that.

[Michael Wernick]

Well, I think there are different aspects of government. There are 300 departments and agencies. You can see them all on GC InfoBase, which I hope you've all bookmarked. It lists all of the federal entities, their budgets, their people, their activities and so on, and is an important transparency tool, by the way.

There are areas like aboriginal affairs and veterans where it's obviously relevant to go back 30 or 40 years in history to deal with adjudication claims, litigation or other issues; in others areas, not so much. If a patent has been awarded, the patent has been awarded, and on we go.

I think it will vary. There are places that generate enormous amounts of records, like the Canada Revenue Agency or the Canada Border Services Agency.

You will remember when you got on an airplane to enter Canada you filled out one of those blue and white paper cards with your customs declaration. What do you think happened to those cards? They had to go somewhere to be read, filtered and so on. It's a wide-ranging area.

I do think that the chief information officer at the Treasury Board should be given a much clearer accountability for records management and should have to do an annual report, which this committee could examine. I do want to make that point. You can have all of the sanctions, deadlines and obligations you want, but you're pushing on a rope if the systems for storage, retrieval and classification of documents and records, which are increasingly in the form of emails and texts, are not invested in. I have yet to work for a government that has invested seriously in records management.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Okay.

In terms of the human resources required for digitization across all of these organizations, you mentioned the cost, but you didn't put a value to it. Do you have any idea of how much that would cost?

[Michael Wernick]

I would suggest that you ask the archivist of Canada. What happens is that departments store things in filing cabinets and storage rooms.

I remember looking at this during the Harper government's deficit reduction plan. Something like 15% to 20% of government real estate was used to store filing cabinets and records. There was a hope that digitizing them would free up real estate and real property, but there's a labour cost of actually going, retrieving, sorting out, applying the exemptions and sending those up the line. Higher up the line, you're dealing with the scarce time of senior managers who have to sign off on the final release, and so on.

It's certainly a large number in terms of the cost of servicing this function. It's scattered across.... It isn't the ATIP shop. The ATIP shop will coordinate the request and chase people down, ask for them to retrieve things and remind them of their obligations, but it will end up in—I don't know—the Regina office of the department or some line function of Veterans Affairs, and so on. It's incredibly uneven out there because of different budgets, different histories and different capabilities in records management and retrieval.

My understanding of it is that as more and more things are created, there's actually more being created than can be processed by Library and Archives and the people who work in that area.

If you want a cost estimate, I think maybe talk to the national archivist.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Wernick.

Here I was thinking that every time I filled out those customs forms they didn't go anywhere, but apparently they do. Thanks again.

[Michael Wernick]

I'm not sure they did, but they were collected and sent somewhere, along with a lot of other records.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

The value of what you have to declare: $200 every time I came back.

Ms. Khalid, you have five minutes.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thanks, Chair.

I'll start with Mr. Wernick.

You've made some really interesting remarks today. I really appreciate your differentiating the focus on transparency as opposed to request-based ATI.

You also mentioned that political staffers should be opened up to ATI, but you also have said that cabinet confidence is a necessity. Can I ask you to unpack that a little bit?

What kind of communication would a political staffer provide, where a bureaucrat talking specifically on policy or on decision-making would not be sufficient, so that we would need to go further toward having a political staffer also be ATIP-ed?

I would love your thoughts on that.

[Michael Wernick]

Sure. Cabinet and its committees are a fairly easy-to-identify zone. There is cabinet and there are committees, which include Treasury Board, and you can know what the agendas, the papers and the deliberations of those cabinet processes are.

Political staff in ministers' offices take part in the whole upstream process of sorting out options and advice. They meet with each other. They meet with public servants. There are plenty of interactions in the process of what they are going to do about this issue or how they are going to respond to that report.

Public servants are involved in the conversations and the advice function and there are political staffers, but the regime only really brings out the part that is public servant to public servant.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thanks for that.

I'll turn to Mr. LaPointe. I really want to understand this a little bit better from a person who's had vast experience in the media.

With the changing role of media and what journalism looks like in today's day and age with blogs and so much information out there, does ATI hinder true journalism or is it a proponent of true journalism? Where do subjectivity or vexatious or frivolous claims fall within that whole category?

You mentioned subjectivity and interpretation of documents. I'm sure you've sometimes received thousands of documents on an issue and you could shape a story whichever way you'd like it to be shaped based on what's in the documents and what's not in the documents you've received.

I'd love you to unpack that a little bit. My apologies for that really loaded question, but I would appreciate anything you can provide as insight.

[Kirk LaPointe]

Yes, let's spend the next four or five hours here.

First of all, there is no such thing as objectivity, right? It's a bit of a myth about journalism. However, there are objective methods. We teach objective methods in order to do research. One of them has to do with primary sources, which come through documents and interviews with particular people, and some of them are secondary sources that involve interpretation.

In terms of ATIP's contribution to journalism, as I said earlier, we cover too much and uncover too little. I think we do ourselves a disservice with the public by having so many voices on somewhat the same announcement, the same issue. We don't diversify our report. We don't see it as a necessity every day to provide people with things they didn't know, things that weren't shaped or provided to them. I think that ATIP can serve an extremely useful role in that.

However, given the resourcing of most newsrooms today, which are much smaller than they were 10 or 20 years ago, it is that much more onerous to break through that. Given the fact that governments have done, I think, an excellent job of staffing themselves up, of finding sophisticated communications people in order to present the image they wish, the information that they wish to de-emphasize, or even to exclude the information they don't want disclosed, we're losing the battle.

I think we're losing the battle in journalism against governments or any institution that wishes to provide information. ATIP is one of our potential assets in this battle to have disclosure. I just wish that there were a freer system of disclosure, something that is more easily accessible and that we are able to provide more of to the public, because the public is increasingly cynical and distrustful of media because of bad information that gets provided, and often on the basis of rumours and second-hand information.

These kinds of documents and records are in fact far more empirical and far more persuasive in their fashioning, in terms of helping to understand how decisions are made and how policies are formed. I just wish that we had more access to it, that it was far more facilitated and with a greater investment behind it, to make sure that happened in a timely way.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you.