Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 16th, 2011

[Suzanne Legault]

That's correct. However, in this year's performance report, the Privy Council indicated to us that it would be significantly improving those timelines. We will follow up next year to see whether that is the case.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Ms. Legault, when an official examines a memorandum to Cabinet or other document discussed in Cabinet in relation to an access to information request, to what lengths is he expected to go to remove information from the part which is to be disclosed to the public? Is there a template? Is what must be reviewed pre-determined?

[Andrea Neill, Assistant Commissioner, Complaints Resolution and Compliance, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada]

Thank you for your question.

As the Commissioner indicated earlier, we review the document provided to us by the Office of the Legal Advisor and the Privy Council. We look at all the details, we check to see whether all the information is there and we compare the documents the institution was authorized to provide us in response to the access request. By looking at all of that, we can be sure the institution has properly applied the rules with respect to excluding Cabinet confidences. The exception you refer to is one of the criteria we would consider. Does the Cabinet confidence go back more than 20 years and is it really covered under the exclusions? That is what we look at when we investigate.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Can those reviews be challenged? Is your decision following that review a final one?

[Andrea Neill]

We carry out our review and, if necessary, we consult the institution during the investigation and confirm everything with it. We then draw our own conclusions as to whether or not it is justified.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Monsieur Proulx.

Mr. Albrecht, for seven minutes.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you, Madame Legault and your team, for being here today.

I just wanted to draw to the attention of members the paper you circulated regarding your role and jurisdiction. Clearly, on page 1, it states, “The mandate of the Information Commissioner--to receive and investigate complaints--is prescribed in sections 30 through 37 of the Access to Information Act”. And then you highlight that again in your concluding statement, where you point out that “The Information Commissioner's jurisdiction extends only to cases where a complaint has been brought pursuant to the Access to Information Act.”

My question relates to the total impact of access to information requests that our government deals with across the government, in addition to crown corporations, and so on.

Could you compare for our committee a rough estimate as to the total number of access to information requests that have been handled perhaps in the last two years, 2009 to 2010, and compare it to 1999 to 2000, somewhere in there?

[Suzanne Legault]

First of all, the collection of statistics and doing any comparative analysis in terms of the volume of requests across the government is the responsibility of the Treasury Board Secretariat. My office does not collect statistics. We don't have those resources, nor is it our mandate.

That being said—and I don't have them with me—I know that this past year the statistics are about 35,000, in terms of access to information requests. That has been growing fairly steadily, about 5% or 6%, year over year. As I said, I don't have those here, but they are publicly available and I can get them for the committee, no problem.

In terms of complaints by crown corporations or the new institutions, it's a fairly small number. In fact, it's somewhat statistically irrelevant. It's about 2% to 3% in terms of requests. In terms of complaints to my office, it is no longer statistically irrelevant because it varied from about 12% to 14%. It's in my special report that I issued this year. So there are high levels of complaints for new institutions.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Just to follow up on that in terms of the costs to Canadians to process access to information requests, I sit on the ethics committee. I don't have the exact number, but it seems to me that there was one department that employed 12 to 18 people full time to deal with access to information requests.

I think everyone around this table wants to improve our response time. That's a given. But I just wondered if you could.... If we were able to meet all of those access to information requests within a very short time, it would mean adding additional personnel and significant costs to Canadians.

I wonder if you could give us an estimate as to what the costs are just for the personnel mandated with the task of responding to access to information requests. We know there are a lot of other costs that departments themselves will be doing with personnel who don't have that specific mandate, but could you give us an estimate of the costs currently, and of what it would be if we were to improve that and have, let's say, a 20% improvement?

[Suzanne Legault]

First of all, I'd like to say that this question is probably not being asked to the right person--

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Okay.

[Suzanne Legault]

--in the sense that I believe that access to information is essential for Canadian democracy and to hold governments accountable. We don't question how much it costs to issue pension cheques to citizens because we consider that a normal service that we provide to our citizens. I also believe that the information produced by government is public sector information, which taxpayers already pay the government to produce.

That aside, as far as I remember--and that's from last year--Treasury Board actually does calculate the cost of processing an access request. It's about $1,400 per request--from last year. In terms of how many resources there are in each institution, I really could not answer that. That would be for Treasury Board Secretariat.

That said, when we have a system that actually has a lot of inefficiencies, in my view, if we were addressing those, we would reduce costs. If we had institutions where we were really processing access requests within the spirit of the act, which is in favour of disclosure as opposed to applying exemptions, we would save a lot of costs within my office in terms of dealing with complaints.

Canada Post is a good example. In my report cards this year, they have sufficient resources, a low volume of pages, a low volume of requests, and one of the worst records we've seen in the history of report cards. So it has nothing to do with resources, money, persons, or volume of requests. It's a question of leadership.

So when we assign a cost in the system the way it is functioning now, I think I would rather see improvements to the system and then an assessment of costs. I think that would be the best way to do it, particularly since a lot of the cost is generated by searching through large volumes of records, and that has to do with catching up in terms of electronic records management in the government. The government is moving that way, but once we are better at that, we will reduce costs.

By the way, the last thing I have to say is $5 cheques, when it probably costs more money to the government to process them...? You know, we can save money in access to information, for sure.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

I want to assure you, the committee, and in fact all Canadians that the government is intent on moving to more open data. Certainly I think you'll see movement on that.

Just as a clarification for me as well, many times we hear that certain information is redacted or blacked out of documents. Could you confirm for us where those decisions are made? Are they made at the public service level or at the political level?

[Suzanne Legault]

It must be made by the people who have the delegated authority under the legislation. In each institution, the head of the institution has the authority to delegate within their institutions. Sometimes it's the minister, while in my office I have the authority, and in a crown corporation it would be the president of Canada Post. They have the authority to delegate within their institutions.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Could you just go quickly through some of the exemptions, what information can be withheld, and for what reasons that information could be withheld?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Very quickly, please, as we have 10 seconds left on this one.

[Suzanne Legault]

Okay. Why don't I ask Assistant Commissioner Neill to do that one?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

All right.

[Andrea Neill]

There are some exemptions that deal with national interest: information from other governments, national security information, the defence of Canada, and economic interests of Canada. There are also exemptions that deal with individual private interests, such as proprietary information of businesses, and also personal information.

There is also a mandatory exemption that references a whole list of acts, such as the Income Tax Act and the Statistics Act, which also applies mandatory exemptions to certain types of information.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

It's important that we have that there are mandatory exemptions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Albrecht.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Monsieur Paquette, seven minutes.