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.