Information & Ethics Committee on Dec. 5th, 2022

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome to meeting number 51 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.

Today’s meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House of Commons order of Thursday, June 23, 2022. Therefore, members may be attending in person or remotely using the Zoom application.

Should any technical challenges arise, please advise me. Please note that we may need to suspend for a few minutes as we need to ensure that all members are able to participate fully.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(h) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, May 16, 2022, the committee is resuming its study of the access to information and privacy system.

Since all witnesses are appearing in person, no sound checks were conducted.

I'd now like to welcome our witnesses for today.

From the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, we have Colleen Calvert, director general, corporate secretary; and Alexandra Drago, director of access to information and privacy.

From the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, we have Derek Melchin, director, access to information and privacy and executive services; and Lesley Soper, director general, national security policy.

From the Privy Council Office we have David Neilson, executive director; and Matthew Shea, the assistant secretary to the cabinet, ministerial services and corporate affairs.

From the Royal Canadian Mounted Police I want to welcome Danielle Golden, director, privacy; and David A. Janzen, the director general, access to information and privacy.

I believe the committee has been supplied with some briefs.

Ms. Calvert, you are going to be starting today. The floor is yours. You have a five-minute opening statement, please.

Thank you.

[Colleen Calvert, Director General, Corporate Secretary, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the committee for the invitation today and for undertaking a study on the access to information and privacy system.

Global Affairs Canada works closely with the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Office of the Information Commissioner, and other federal institutions to share best practices, to address complaints, and to position ourselves to successfully meet operational challenges.

Most recently, Commissioner Maynard visited our department in early October to meet with then acting Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cindy Termorshuizen.

At Global Affairs, we recognize the importance of continuing to improve on-time responses, implementing efficiencies and building capacity through education and skills development on ATIP. We can, and must, do better.

This past June, Global Affairs Canada, under the direction of the deputy ministers, adopted an ambitious plan to reduce the backlog of access to information requests, recognizing the need to do better. Targets were established, the responsibility level of assistant deputy ministers was strengthened, and accelerated training was implemented.

To date, since the start of the fiscal year, we have trained 544 departmental employees on access to information. Our efforts are supported by commitments horizontally, that is, throughout the department, and vertically, or at all levels, both of which are essential. Progress is monitored very closely. In addition, gaps are identified and reported as soon as possible.

We are making progress. The proportion of requests processed on time, which had fallen to a low of 19% during the first year of the pandemic, has now risen to 57%. This represents steady improvement. We have achieved this at a time when access to information requests regarding the previous fiscal year have risen by 30%.

The challenges we experienced during the pandemic have sharpened our understanding of what we need to change. First, we needed to identify ATIP as a critical service to access our buildings during repeated waves of the pandemic. At the outset of the pandemic, our ATIP processing software was housed on a secure network, accessible only from the office. Global Affairs identified access to information as a critical service. Between June and September 2020, virtually all GAC ATIP employees resumed working on site, including processing secret and top secret files.

As we work to fully clear our backlog, I would like to highlight two other areas of focus. First is people. The shortage of qualified ATIP specialists is well known. We work on multiple fronts to fill positions: holding our own GAC recruitment processes, working with the Treasury Board Secretariat and other government departments on the community development office initiative on collective staffing processes and with our internal professional development program encouraging employees to build a career in ATIP.

We also have a number of specialists on contract who are experienced with access to information. All of these efforts are needed to make up for long-standing staff shortages across the federal government in the area of access to information.

Let me talk about our investments in technology. Last year, we set up a new system for processing unclassified documents for ATIP requests, which increases our efficiency and our flexibility for remote work. Over the next fiscal year, we will begin transitioning to a new generation of document processing software for ATIP, taking advantage of the Treasury Board Secretariat’s recent approval of new technology resources. This transition will propel our system, currently based on 2007 standards, to the 2020s, with obvious gains in efficiency and the possibility of using tools such as artificial intelligence.

In closing, I would like to reiterate that my department takes the efficient processing of ATIP requests within established timelines very seriously. We will continue the efforts we undertook earlier in the year.

I would be happy to take your questions at the end of the opening remarks.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Ms. Calvert.

Next is the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness.

I don't have a list of who's speaking, but whoever is next, go ahead, please.

[Lesley Soper, Director General, National Security Policy, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Honourable members, thank you for the invitation to join you today.

In addition to my counterparts from other departments, I'm joined by my colleague Derek Melchin, the director of ATIP and executive services here at Public Safety Canada.

Public Safety Canada plays a key role by ensuring coordination across all departments and agencies responsible for national security and the safety of Canadians.

Our mandate is to keep Canadians safe from a range of risks such as natural disasters, crime and terrorism. Public Safety Canada therefore works with agencies and review bodies within the public safety portfolio, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which is represented here today.

In terms of access to information, while Public Safety Canada works in close cooperation with partner agencies in the portfolio, each agency is responsible for its own ATIP program.

Public Safety has had a strong track record for timely completion of access to information requests, completing over 90% of requests within the legislative timelines in 14 of the last 15 fiscal years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as was the case with the entire public service, the department was forced to shift temporarily to a remote work posture to protect the health and safety of employees. During this time, Public Safety was limited in its ability to process files containing classified or physical records that could not be accessed by employees working remotely.

Over the past year, measures have been taken to restore full capacity to process requests. Substantial progress is being made in addressing the department's backlog in delayed files.

As director general of national security policy, I am the Public Safety lead on declassification. As you know, Canada does not have a formal national security and intelligence declassification policy framework. The Treasury Board Secretariat policy on government security, which governs the management of security and protection of information, does not contain guidance for proactive declassification. In the absence of such a framework, the Access to Information Act has become the primary mechanism through which national security and intelligence records are made available to the public.

To help solve this problem, Public Safety Canada, in cooperation with the national intelligence and security community, Treasury Board Secretariat and Library and Archives Canada, has worked to develop a declassification framework setting out a practical approach to proactive declassification within that community.

The framework was tested by means of a pilot project that reviewed the records of the joint intelligence committee that operated between 1942 and 1960, which were held by the Privy Council Office. It aimed to provide an evidence base for future larger-scale proactive reviews of national and security intelligence records and to build consensus on the way forward on declassification.

Declassification is generally understood to refer to the public release of records. It is worth bearing in mind that the level of classification reflects the extent of the injury to the national interest that would be caused if the information were released.

When a document is declassified, it has been determined that the document's release in full, or perhaps still partially redacted, would no longer cause injury, but even after a document has been declassified it may still need to be redacted to remove information that is sensitive for other reasons, such as the protection of personal information.

The records must also be available in both official languages.

Finally, they need to be digitized to support government policies on accessibility, such as being machine-readable for those who are visually impaired.

Together, these elements require a great amount of work and financial resources. Implementing a complete framework to support the proactive disclosure of historical documents would require the commitment of considerable resources.

Still, we believe the work we have done is a step in the right direction, as proactive declassification review would significantly reduce the burden of processing access to information requests. The release of historical records would also assist public and academic researchers.

Finally, Public Safety's declassification work reflects the government's national security transparency commitment to better inform Canadians regarding national security in support of democratic accountability without providing information that could compromise Canada's security or the safety of Canadians.

I would like to thank the committee for giving Public Safety Canada the opportunity to discuss these requests and any other matter that may be of interest to you today.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Ms. Soper.

Next, for five minutes, Mr. Shea, the floor is yours.

Mr. Shea is from the Privy Council Office.

[Matthew Shea, Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Ministerial Services and Corporate Affairs, Privy Council Office]

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee.

Thank you for inviting the Privy Council Office to appear before you today to discuss Canada's access to information and privacy system.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are gathered on traditional unceded Algonquin Anishinabe territory.

I am the assistant secretary to the cabinet for ministerial services and corporate affairs at the Privy Council. I oversee all corporate affairs within the department, including the team responsible for coordinating all access to information requests and privacy requests within the department.

I am joined today by David Neilson, executive director, access to information and privacy, at the Privy Council Office, a position he has held for over 10 years.

Together, David and I are responsible for leading and implementing the Access to Information and Privacy Acts within PCO, including developing internal policies and procedures.

We have a dedicated and very hard-working unit responsible for managing requests for departmental and personal information, ensuring corporate understanding and compliance with the acts and fostering corporate awareness of access and privacy rights and responsibilities for all Canadians.

PCO fully appreciates the importance of making government more accessible to everyone and providing Canadians with greater transparency of government programs, activities, publications and spending, and we are committed to those objectives.

We strive to meet our legislative timelines and ensure that government information is available to Canadians.

PCO's combination of information holdings is unique compared to other institutions. The documents within our control include cabinet confidences, secret and top secret information holdings including sensitive intelligence assessments in addition to more traditional information holdings that many departments have.

Like many departments, the pandemic impacted our ability to meet our access to information obligations, particularly early in the pandemic. Many of our access to information requests involve secret and top secret information, which is stored in vaults or on segregated networks for security purposes.

This made the early days of the pandemic particularly challenging for PCO at a time when public health advice required us to minimize the number of employees in the office. This led to a sharp increase in the number of active files and ultimately a large backlog, which we continue to work hard to address. Compounding this challenge, throughout the summer of 2020, PCO received almost double the amount of ATIP requests compared to the same period before the pandemic.

As a department, we have taken several steps to proactively address this challenge. We took steps to transition from a largely paper-based process to an electronic process where possible, allowing more non-sensitive files to be processed remotely. We have identified ATIP as a critical service, which allowed us to have more employees in the office to process files.

We added additional budget to both our ATIP and information teams to assist them in addressing the backlog. We have made information management and ATIP a priority within the department and a regular topic of conversation at our departmental management committee.

As an aggregator of information, PCO holds a large volume of information from other government institutions. We are coordinating with other institutions to ensure we work together closely to find efficiencies in our efforts.

Our focus and investment has resulted in two key outcomes.

First, we have identified ATIP as a critical service. That quickly allowed us to begin to flatten the growth curve of our ATIP backlog. Simply put, we stopped the bleeding.

Second, by establishing a dedicated team to address the backlog, we are systematically chipping away at it. We are deeply committed to eliminating this backlog as soon as possible, but we acknowledge it will take a concerted effort for several years. In 2021, we closed far fewer files than we received, resulting in a large backlog. In 2021-22, we received 509 requests and closed 532 requests. In the current fiscal year, we believe we are on track to make further improvements by closing many more files than we have received.

In conclusion, I would say that we take very seriously any shortcomings in the service standards that Canadians have come to expect from public institutions. We are committed to eliminating the backlog and ensuring that requests receive a response in a timely and reasonable manner. We are very committed to ensuring that Canadians have access to government information and the important role this plays in a healthy democracy. We will pursue continuous improvements to accomplish this.

We look forward to elaborating on some of these elements in response to your questions. Thank you again for this opportunity.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Shea.

Next are members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I don't have a list of who's going to be speaking, but please go ahead.

[David Janzen, Director General, Access to Information and Privacy, Royal Canadian Mounted Police]

Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, hello.

My name is David Janzen. I'm the director general of the access to information and privacy branch at the RCMP.

I am joined by my colleague Danielle Golden, our new director of privacy.

I'm honoured to be invited to speak to you today on this important issue from the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

I'd like to start by addressing a point that will come as no surprise to this committee. For the last decade, the RCMP has struggled in its responsibility to be compliant under both the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act. The Information Commissioner's 2020 systematic investigation of the RCMP outlined this in stark detail and directly led to the minister issuing a direction to develop a strategy to address the report's recommendations.

I'm pleased to say that we have not only embraced the recommendations in this report, but we've taken it as a rallying cry for change.

For the RCMP, this is a critical issue as without transparency, we cannot build trust and without trust, citizens are less likely to work with us in investigations. That is why we went further than addressing the systemic investigation in our five-year strategy, “Access Granted: Restoring Trust in the RCMP's Access to Information and Privacy Program”.

This strategy is an ambitious plan to modernize from not only an access to information perspective, but privacy as well, which I am sure is of interest to you.

I encourage anyone with interest to review the strategy and follow our progress on our ATIP modernization page, which is on our external website.

While we are still early in this effort, we are seeing some results. Firstly, we have succeeded in resolving one of the Information Commissioner's key concerns—evidenced by the title of the review and her recent testimony to this committee—which is the need for leadership.

Just two years ago, our program was led by a single director supported by three managers. Neither my position nor my colleague's position existed.

Today, we have a director general and three directors each leading dedicated streams for information access, privacy and operational support, supported by eight managers.

Our staff is growing, from approximately 60 FTEs toward a funded FTE complement of over 100 FTEs.

We contracted business consultants to help us improve processes, created intergovernmental fora to share best practices, and implemented new training and guidance material for our personnel. We have and continue to invest in new technologies to help process requests more efficiently and to help us leverage the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic to create a more national workforce.

In terms of concrete results, in the last fiscal year our information compliance rate increased to 40.1% from 26.4%. The Privacy Act compliance increased to 46.1% from 32.8%.

These results were achieved thanks to the hard work of our personnel, the support of our senior leadership, and despite the numerous challenges that continue to impact our chances at success.

For example, we all share the challenge of attracting new staff. Let's be blunt. There are currently far more positions than candidates in ATIP, particularly at the most demanding levels. While the RCMP is trying to change this with clear career streams, the fact remains that there are insufficient numbers of candidates to fill our vacancies.

Staffing challenges make it difficult for us to manage some of the RCMP's unique challenges that result from our mandate.

The RCMP is front and centre at the major events of public interest in Canada, which inevitably result in a significant number of requests.

Tasking, collecting and reviewing records in a situation when the very employees who hold them are assisting in a flood evacuation or investigating a tragedy is a unique challenge. This requires experienced and informed ATIP personnel, who are extremely difficult to replace. The RCMP also remains a largely paper-based organization, such that manual searches through boxes of files are still necessary.

This committee is also no stranger to our need to conduct robust privacy assessments of new technologies. We have created an entire stream for privacy compliance, which includes reviewing and approving privacy impact assessments, to ensure that we have the capacity to stay ahead of critical but invasive emerging technologies.

In closing, I want to stress that the RCMP is committed to modernizing, and that I and my employees are passionate about improving this critical function at the RCMP. However, I do not want to paint a picture that we are satisfied with the early progress we have made. We know we must keep building on this, and these efforts will take continued investment.

However, these early results provide much needed momentum to fuel the changes that need to take place.

I am happy to provide the committee with any information you require for your review. I look forward to the results of your study to further help us refine our modernization effort to better serve Canadians.

We look forward to your questions and the forthcoming discussion.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Janzen.

Thank you to all of our witnesses today for sticking to the timelines. You can imagine how difficult that is when there are eight of you at the table.

We're going to open the rounds of questions. We're going to start with Mr. Barrett, followed by Ms. Hepfner, Monsieur Villemure and Monsieur Green.

Mr. Barrett, you have six minutes, please.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Thanks very much, Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for being here today.

Mr. Neilson, how many staff in PCO are subject to ATIP protocol?

[David Neilson, Executive Director, Access to Information and Privacy and Executive Correspondence Services, Privy Council Office]

How many staff are in the ATIP office working on ATIP requests?

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

How many staff in the Privy Council Office...?

[David Neilson]

There are....

[Matthew Shea]

There are approximately 1,200 employees at PCO, and they're all subject to the act.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

I'm going to work across the table to get a response to my next couple of questions, if I can, from each agency.

The question is whether you use any tech or artificial intelligence facilitated by the government contractor GC Strategies in relation to your ATIP protocols.

[Derek Melchin, Director, Access to Information and Privacy and Executive Services, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness]

I'm not aware of any technology at Public Safety Canada related to that company.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Thank you.

[David Neilson]

I'm not aware of PCO using that technology.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Okay.

[Colleen Calvert]

I'm not aware of any for GAC.

[David Janzen]

From the RCMP, we're not aware of that technology.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Great.

We'll go in the same order again. Do you use any consultants to fulfill your ATIP requests or obligations?

[Derek Melchin]

At Public Safety, we don't currently employ any consultants working on access to information.

[David Neilson]

The PCO does not use consultants at this time.

[Colleen Calvert]

We do at GAC. I would say it's between an average of maybe eight to 10 contractors who also work directly in our ATIP division.