Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 12th, 2026

[Matthew Shea]

In cases where they ask for every single email from every official for the last five years, that becomes very difficult for us to deal with, as you can likely appreciate.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Shea.

Ms. Church.

[Leslie Church, Liberal, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Let me start by thanking PCO for being here. I think all of us know how much work happens at PCO. It's an acronym, but it's actually a big team of people who are contributing a lot to the public service of our country, so thank you.

I think you're probably hearing from us today—and I hope my colleagues would agree—that some of the tensions we're finding right now are really around.... When this act was drafted, and since it was amended, did it envision a situation where three repeat requesters would take up so many resources within this team? How does it operate within the context now of a digital workplace, where millions of records are created on an annual basis? These are difficult questions to keep up with, considering the requests that likely come in on access to information.

I wanted to ask you, Mr. Shea, about your comment on the challenge of overkeeping information, because I do think that is a challenge. The flip side of that is the responsibility for ensuring that we are keeping careful safeguarding of sensitive and classified information. Can you speak a bit about the difference between transitory records and records of business value, and maybe some of the operational risks in keeping transitory information indefinitely?

[Matthew Shea]

I'll turn first to my colleague to give you a definition of that, and then I may add a bit to it.

[Alexandra Freeland, Director General, Data and Information Services, Privy Council Office]

Thank you.

Transitory information is needed for a short period of time. It's setting up a meeting, for example, and conversations that go back and forth.

Business value is the record of the decisions and actions that departments have taken in the course of their business activities. A subset of that information is of archival value, which has value for Canadians. Our colleagues at Library and Archives can speak to that. It is not a huge proportion in most departments, but at the PCO, it is a very high percentage of our information, given the work we do.

[Leslie Church, Liberal, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Obviously, part of your role is determining what is transitory and what is an archival record. Are there operational risks that you are seeing in keeping this transitory information?

I think Mr. Shea mentioned the challenge of overkeeping information. Is that contributing to some of the challenges or the delays we're hearing about today?

[Alexandra Freeland]

It is. It contributes volume, and it isn't necessarily volume that adds value for the requesters. Our challenge is to sift that away so that we can focus on the information of value to requesters.

We focus on process in the department and the interactions of people as they finalize files, meetings, etc., to capture the important material. We then provide a lot of guidance and, in some cases, some system settings to either encourage people or automatically reduce the volume of transitory information.

[Leslie Church, Liberal, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Could you also expand a bit on why protecting these classes of sensitive, classified or cabinet confidence-related information...? How do you do that in practice? How do those protections support decision-making in the government and the day-to-day functioning of the government? Why is that important?

[Matthew Shea]

That's a broad question in terms of all the different types, but when it comes to cabinet confidences, it really is about the ability of cabinet to have those honest discussions with the knowledge that there's cabinet solidarity and you can give your best advice.

We have commercially sensitive information at the Privy Council Office, and sometimes, obviously, that comes down to the question of trust with the industry. If we don't properly protect that, we won't be trusted with it. Other departments—less so we—deal regularly with private information. If you show Canadians that you don't handle their private information well, that's a problem for the institution, not just for the department. We take it very seriously, to make sure that we safeguard all of that information.

Going back to your original premise, the challenge can be that if we don't delete some of those personal emails between colleagues, doctor's appointments or whatever they are, we still have to go through them as part of our process. That is through no fault of the requester. That is through no fault of any parliamentary committee. That is our fault. We need to do a better job. That is not unique to the PCO.

We have certainly been trying to do information management training, both with exempt staff coming in with the new government and with employees on a regular basis. We have seen some improvements. We have done some things like limiting the size of email boxes to try to force some type of regular cleanup of those transitory emails.

I think there's some hope when it comes to things like Microsoft Copilot, which can go through and, say, find all the emails from my wife, and then I can quickly look at those, say they're all transitory and let them go. We are trying to use technology where possible. This is something we're seized with.

I heard Alex talk about the types of information. We're lucky to have Alex, who's a librarian by trade. She has come in here with real IM expertise and is trying to help us with this.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Shea.

We have time for four minutes for Mr. Cooper, and then Monsieur Sari after.

Mr. Cooper, you have four minutes. Go ahead.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

In addition to there being real problems around failing to meet the statutory deadline set out in the act, the commissioner, in her meeting with the clerk, noted that there were other problems with the handling of access to information requests. For example, she noted that work that needs to be done to implement an order—an order that she needed to issue because the PCO didn't follow the law—should and could have been done prior to a complaint being submitted.

In other words, not only is the PCO not meeting the statutory deadline, but there are instances, according to the commissioner, where the PCO is effectively sitting on access to information requests, not doing anything until a complaint arises, and then still not doing anything, because it was necessary for the commissioner to issue an order.

Do you think it's acceptable to sit on access to information requests? We're talking, after all, about what you've correctly acknowledged to be a quasi-constitutional right.

[Matthew Shea]

I'll answer again by saying that we have a large backlog, so there is no question that access to information requests are taking longer than we'd like them to take. We do our best to prioritize them. One of the things that orders do is force our prioritization. If something wasn't next in the queue and there's an order given by the Information Commissioner, it becomes the next in the queue. That is why we have so many people focused on orders right now—

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Sitting on access requests.... I asked the commissioner—

[Matthew Shea]

If I could potentially finish my answer—

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

—and she said that this is happening frequently.

I'll let you address that. Go ahead.

[Matthew Shea]

I just think that we are genuinely making an effort to do this. We are genuinely trying to prioritize, but it does not mean that we are not doing the work. I do think...and I really struggle to comment on what other people have said, because I don't know the context of—

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

How about “exaggerated claims of harm”? That's another issue.

[Matthew Shea]

I'm happy to go through some of that.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Mr. Hardy asked you about going to court. Well, a requester had to go to court. He had to go to court because the PCO refused to provide the entirety of a report that the commissioner had recommended to be released. In the end, the only issue was a matter of cost, because finally the PCO relented, but only after the requester went to court. Consequently, the PCO was slapped on the wrist with $4,400 in costs.

There are massive delays, sitting on requests, exaggerated claims of harm. Is that acceptable?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

You have a minute, Mr. Shea. I'm going to give you time to respond to that.

[Matthew Shea]

Thank you. I appreciate your giving me time to respond to that.

First, from the meeting I was at, I believe that when she was saying that we should have done stuff before—and I don't know the specific comment—she was referring to historical intelligence being transferred to Library and Archives, and she has orders related to that. As I started my testimony by saying, we are committed to transferring that historical intelligence to Library and Archives. That has been one of the things we have been working on in earnest since that conversation with her, and we took it quite seriously.

In terms of the exaggerations of harm, I don't know what specific files she is talking about, but we started by talking about national security.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Well, Barnes v. Canada is one of them.

[Matthew Shea]

I apologize. I don't know the specific file that you're speaking of, but in terms of exaggerations of harm, I think there can be differences of opinion between intelligent, well-meaning people.

When it comes to national security files, at times we don't see—

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

It sounds like PCO has a lot of work to do.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Cooper.

Mr. Saini.