Government Operations Committee on April 21st, 2026

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Good afternoon.

Welcome to meeting number 36 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.

We are continuing our study on the CER. We have witnesses with us from Library and Archives Canada.

Welcome to OGGO.

I understand, Ms. Weir, that you have an opening statement. The floor is yours for five minutes. Please go ahead.

[Leslie Weir, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Library and Archives of Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Leslie Weir, and I'm the librarian and archivist of Canada at Library and Archives Canada. I am joined by my colleagues Jennifer Schofield, who's the assistant deputy minister of collections, and Jean Deschamps, who is the acting chief financial officer and assistant deputy minister of corporate services.

Thank you so much for the invitation to appear before this committee and for rescheduling because of travel conflicts.

Library and Archives Canada's mandate is to serve as a source of enduring knowledge that is accessible to all and to act as the continuing memory of the Government of Canada and its institutions. We serve not only as a government institution but also as Canada's national library and Canada's national archives. In doing so, we provide broad access to our collections, which is a cornerstone of our existence.

In determining the 15% reduction in our 2025-26 main estimates as required by the comprehensive expenditure review, we had to make very difficult decisions. This was not the first round of reductions for Library and Archives Canada. Previous reductions had impacted all program areas related to acquiring, preserving and making accessible our documentary heritage, as well as our internal services.

When we at LAC examined the reductions for the CER exercise, we were limited in where else we could reduce. We decided to focus our reductions in three key areas.

The first is the discontinuation of the documentary heritage communities program, which was supporting organizations across Canada to preserve and describe documentary heritage and make it accessible. This represents a reduction of $1.6 million annually. LAC will continue to work with the organizations through nonfinancial means.

The second is a reduction of the temporary funding that had been allotted to ATIP and proactive access activities by $13.6 million by 2029. This includes eliminating the declassification and reappraisal functions at LAC, as well as reducing the number of ATIP employees and other ATIP-related functions across the organization. LAC has made significant gains in reducing the backlog and increasing compliance through policy and procedural changes with the temporary funding we received, and this has allowed us to be more sustainable as a program at a lower funding level.

Lastly, given all the reductions, Library and Archives Canada has reviewed its organizational structure to identify further savings of $6.9 million by 2028-29. Through this review, we have reduced the number of executives and managers and some administrative support, and we have grouped functions to try to be more efficient and focused on both LAC priorities and the priorities of the government.

These reductions will impact our workforce. Specifically, by 2028-29, approximately 161 positions will be reduced. Of these, 56 indeterminate employees will see their positions eliminated through either workforce adjustment or executive career transition measures.

Of important note, the government has allocated LAC funding for its ATIP function in the amount of $81.9 million over four years beginning in 2027-28 and $22.4 million on an ongoing basis from 2031. The temporary funding for ATIP and proactive access will still need to be reduced by $13.6 million over three years, as outlined in LAC’s CER proposal.

This ongoing funding will ensure that LAC can maintain improvements to its ATIP services, including sustained efforts to reduce the backlog, increase on-time compliance and advance innovative initiatives that enhance access to its collections.

Thank you very much. My colleagues and I look forward to answering questions from the committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thanks, Ms. Weir.

We'll start with six minutes for Mrs. Block, please.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much, Ms. Weir, for joining us today. It's my understanding that you are the librarian and archivist, although your position is probably comparable to that of a deputy minister. Is that correct?

[Leslie Weir]

I'm actually a deputy head.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

You're a deputy head. Okay, thank you very much.

I was looking at your departmental plan, and I noted it states that processing ATIP requests will remain a top priority. You mentioned this today, but you haven't been able to meet the targets that your department has set in previous years.

We know that cuts are being undertaken. Will the cuts being made in your department affect your ability to respond to access to information requests?

[Leslie Weir]

Yes, they will.

You have to realize that the main estimates for 2025-26 included the ATIP money that we have been given as project funding. As I mentioned earlier, we have already reduced the rest of our operations to an absolute minimum.

Of course, we're not just the memory of the Government of Canada; we are here to ensure that our collections reflect Canada's literature, music, culture and history. We need to be sure we can meet our obligations related to the government record, provide access to those records and, at the same time, ensure we are still fulfilling our legally mandated responsibilities to reflect the identity of Canada.

In terms of the actual details around the reductions we are doing and the impact they will have, I'm going to turn to my colleague Jennifer Schofield, who oversees our access to information operation within the sector of collections.

[Jennifer Schofield, Assistant Deputy Minister, Collections Sector, Library and Archives of Canada]

Thank you.

I would note there is a risk there we will not be able to comply, because there is an unknown in the requests that we receive. We believe that our ongoing funding will allow us to continue to improve and to maintain the improvements we've already made, but if we were to receive a really large request, at that point we would have less capacity for flux. That is a risk.

That being said, we have data on the access to information requests that we have received over decades now, and our plan reflects that data, so we will be able to maintain and continue to improve through our policy and procedural changes.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Just to be clear, you're not meeting your targets, you haven't met them for a number of years and you have a backlog, but you're confident you're going to be able to maintain where you are right now, where you're not meeting your targets. Is that correct?

[Leslie Weir]

We meet 80% of the targets for incoming access to information and privacy requests. The challenge with the current legislation is that if we were to get a request for one million pages of restricted records, this would need to be dealt with, in theory, before we could move on to any other requests that have been submitted. This, at an average cost for restricted records of $75 per page, would be a $75-million request.

The scale, as Jennifer mentioned, is key. We may get thousands of requests for a relatively limited number of pages that we can easily go and pull from our collections, digitize, redact as appropriate and serve up to the requester, but then when we get a request for hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, it can make our processes more complicated.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

The fulfillment of these requests is a requirement of the law, so how do you rationalize not fulfilling these requests when it is the law and you could be breaking the law by not fulfilling the requests and your mandate?

[Leslie Weir]

We respond to requesters within 30 days and have exchanges with them about the records they require. We try to fulfill requests as best we can. When we have requests of a very large scale, sometimes the requester is interested in breaking their request down into a series of requests so that we can be sure we give them the highest-priority materials they're looking for.

You have to realize that we have more than 200 linear kilometres of federal government print records that are all in boxes. We have them in different buildings across the country, including in British Columbia, Winnipeg, Renfrew and Ottawa-Gatineau, and the process to go and physically get the boxes, bring them to a site where we can digitize them and then provide the digital records to the analyst....

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

However, that's what you've been mandated to do.

[Leslie Weir]

That is correct.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thanks.

Ms. Sudds, go ahead.

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

I thank all of you for being here with us today.

Can you explain why Library and Archives Canada receives among the highest volumes of ATIP requests within the federal government? How has the demand changed over the years?

[Leslie Weir]

Thank you very much for the question. I think it's a very important one.

We are the custodians of the historical government record. We have records that are no longer in active use, and we hold those records for more than 300 government entities; about 172 of those entities are still actively functioning.

Under the current access to information law, the way the system works is those records come to us once a department decides that they're no longer active and that they can be turned into an archival record. This could be after five years, 30 years, 50 years or 100 years. They come to us basically closed by default. Restricted records remain restricted when they're transferred to us, and then we have to consult with the department that was the originator of those records.

The vast majority of our records are print—analog—but we do, of course, ingest digital records. When we have digital records, we can leverage tools to ensure we can serve up the information far more quickly than when we're dealing with print records.

Jennifer, do you want to add anything?

[Jennifer Schofield]

Over time, what we've moved from, as have all government organizations, is a model of file cabinets with very clearly marked records into one in which we now, as Ms. Weir mentioned, have over 200 linear kilometres of records. These records require a lot more manual labour to retrieve and process than they would in a normal organization. They are paper. The box has to be found and gone through. If there's mould on the records, it has to be remediated.

We have a lot of additional challenges that you wouldn't think of regarding the condition of some of the records and so on, and that's all before digitization and processing them. It can take longer, and we've seen that play out over the years.

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata, ON]

That piques my curiosity.

Are there efforts under way to digitize so you can move away from having to store all of these records?

[Leslie Weir]

We have substantial digitization initiatives, which historically covered many parts of our collection, to digitize books that were out of copyright and digitize other special collections that we have.

Currently, 95% of our digitization efforts are probably dedicated to supporting access to information. We do proactive disclosure on records, and we have a team that has worked to identify high-use records that can then be digitized and made available in a proactive manner, so people don't have to make a request and go through access to information.

Interestingly, some of our most popular files are military records, especially about World War II. We have a major push on to digitize records related to serving members of the Canadian military for World War II, especially as we look at upcoming anniversaries.

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata, ON]

This ties in with what I am going to ask next.

What categories of requests consume the greatest amount of time and resources?

[Leslie Weir]

I'll start by saying that the records of the military go from National Defence directly to us. For people who think they might go to Veterans Affairs, they don't; they come to us. We're dealing with the personnel who have left the military.

We get historical requests, but we also support them in getting individual retired members access to their own files.

I'll ask Jennifer to jump in about some of the other high-volume requests we get.

[Jennifer Schofield]

That is the greatest amount. More than half of our backlog relates to personnel files from the military and federal public service.

I was looking at my numbers. There are 4.85 million personnel files. It's a huge volume, and it's mainly paper, although we're working on that. We've put policy changes in effect as well so that if the former Canadian Armed Forces member's date of birth is more than 110 years ago, we will go ahead and release the records, presuming the time has passed.

Right now, this eliminates about 30% of the requests we have coming in, and we anticipate that by 2030, 64% of the requests coming in will no longer require this review, so they will be much faster to process and get through the system. It's one way we're reducing our backlogs.

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata, ON]

Is that part of your ATIP action plan? Could you perhaps elaborate on the items in the action plan and the status to date?