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.