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.