It's difficult for me to provide advice to you as parliamentarians in accessing information outside the system of access to information, because my role is really to implement the act. I know that some of you have used the act, and you know how frustrating that could be as well, because of delays and because of exemptions being used. My office is not able to seek cabinet confidence within our investigations as well. We are the only jurisdiction in Canada in which a commissioner does not have access to cabinet confidence to confirm that the information is actually a secret of cabinet.
I think if there's advice to be given, I've been asking for a legislative review. The government had promised one. Within our legislation right now, there's a mandatory legislative review that was going to be happening in 2020. It led to a list of issues with the system, but the review of the actual legislation will happen only in 2025, I'm told.
As parliamentarians, I think, as members, you have the power to make recommendations with respect to what kinds of statutes you think that Canadians are entitled to. The right of access is not just for you, but for journalists, for Canadians, for members. There's a lot of information out there, and I always said that the records of government are public records. It's not a privilege to access those. Access is a right, and we should not have to struggle to get access to that information. It should be provided as voluntarily as possible.
One thing I advise is to change the legislation to modernize it, to make it more accessible.