Information & Ethics Committee on April 18th, 2023

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

With specificity, because words matter, Madam Minister—we've done this a long time—I'm going to ask you this very clearly and very slowly: Do you agree with the Information Commissioner that they should have an independent funding body, absent of the Prime Minister and the minister, in order to keep their independence—yes or no?

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

We, of course, discuss budget requests through cabinet confidence. I am not in a position to say if we will give her independence in funding, but we do recognize the independence of the Information Commissioner.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

You can agree with the notion without hiding behind cabinet confidence, quite frankly. You can agree with the general philosophy that an arm's length—

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Again, budget requests are not in my purview. Therefore, I would—

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

As the President of the Treasury Board, you don't deal with budget requests. Is that your submission to this committee?

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

I believe the finance minister is the one who allocates the budget.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

You don't deal with any of them. You don't sign off on the budget.

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

I do not sign off on the budget decisions. I'm sorry. I work with the operations of what the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister decide for budget. I work with that.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I served on public accounts and recall the relationship quite clearly.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Green and Minister.

We will now begin the second round.

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Mr. Chair, I'd like to say something, if I may.

One of my team members told me that I may have misled the committee. Since it's important to be forthright, may I make a clarification?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Yes.

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Just to make sure that I clarify the remarks that I made at the end of the first round, Mr. Chair, Bill C-58 introduced legal requirements for proactive publications that apply to ministers and not to cabinet. I used the word “cabinet”, so I just wanted to make sure.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you for the clarification, Minister.

Over to you, Mr. Gourde, for five minutes.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for being with us today.

In your opening remarks, you said that Canada ranked seventh when it came to open data. Is that seventh in the world or seventh in a ranking of comparable countries? How many countries is the ranking based on?

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

I'm drawing a blank, so I'm going to ask my team for help.

[Stephen Burt]

It's a global ranking, but I'm not sure exactly how many countries it's based on.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

It would be useful to know how many are comparable to Canada. Some countries, we can't compare ourselves with. Coming in seventh out of 150 countries is pretty good, but coming in seventh out of 22, not so much.

You said a lot of requests come in, but I'm also interested in the ones that are closed. We often hear complaints about processing times from people who submit ATI requests. On average, do people wait weeks, months or years? Can you talk about that?

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Yes. Thank you for your question.

The number of closed requests is growing, but not at the same rate as the incoming requests. That is why the number of requests carried over to the following year has consistently grown over the past decade.

The Treasury Board continues to remind departments of their obligations under the Access to Information Act. Treasury Board staff continue to work with institutions to support, as I mentioned, recruitment, professional—

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Thank you, Minister, but my question was about whether requests are processed within four months, six months or a year, or whether half the requests are responded to in the first year and the other half take longer. That would be more helpful and perhaps more accurate.

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

A total of 70.7% of requests are processed within the 30‑day time frame set out in the act. Keep in mind that that doesn't include Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, because as I said earlier, the department receives 80% of all requests. For all other departments, then, the rate is 70.7%.

I can tell you that, at Treasury Board, 90.2% of requests are processed within the 30‑day time frame. As you know, the act allows for extensions beyond the 30 days, so institutions can continue processing the request.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

You brought up the immigration department, and that's something that concerns me. Your department is the watchdog for access to information, and apparently, requests sometimes end up in inactive email boxes of people who are retired or who have even passed away. These are requests containing very sensitive information on prospective immigrants or other immigration-related cases.

Have you done anything to prevent that from happening? We're talking about the immigration department, but it could happen in other departments as well.

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

I understand completely. Thank you for your question. Since you're asking about specific requests, I'm going to have Mr. Burt answer.

[Stephen Burt]

I would reiterate what Ms. Luelo said. When it comes to the requests received by the immigration department, what's most important is making sure that people's requests are dealt with as service requests, not as ATI requests. If a system were put in place to preserve the status of those requests, it would be much easier to see where the request was in the system.

We are working on that as we speak. It's important that requests end up in the right place, and it's also important to have a new separate system to process ATI requests.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

I think that's really important.

Minister, you have a constituency office, so you know the huge number of immigration cases that come across our desks. Unfortunately, sometimes we come to find out that long-outstanding requests have simply been sitting in an inactive email box.

Are there any statistics on the percentage of cases that fall in that category? Could it be more than 10%?