Thank you. It's an honour for me to appear before this committee.
Let me open briefly by outlining my background.
I first served in the Canadian Armed Forces for 34 years, retiring in 1993. At the time of my retirement, I was acting as the corporate secretary of the National Defence headquarters. Soon after, I attended law school. After articling in the Federal Court of Appeal, I was called to the Ontario bar—exactly 22 years ago today.
On this day in 2002, I opened the first law practice in Canada specializing in military law. In 2009, the University of Ottawa appointed me as an adjunct professor in the faculty of law, where I taught military law and access to information and privacy. I've since co-authored a number of legal texts, including one on federal access to information and privacy and another on Canadian military law.
As part of my law practice, I use the access regime on a regular basis on behalf of my clients—individuals and corporates—in order to gain access to information and public records in the pursuit of their individual claims. To give you an idea of the scope of my reliance on the access and privacy law, suffice it to say that since September 2007, my firm has submitted a total of 4,645 access requests under the federal access law and some provincial access laws to over 250 federal institutions. We did not hit them all, but we hit a number of them. As you may well imagine, in the process, we have come across every frustration possible.
In my experience, the federal access and privacy processes are bogged down by long delays, which are made even worse—I don't think this part has been discussed by your committee yet—by the Office of the Information Commissioner and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. They are tasked with investigating complaints and take, on average, a minimum of one year to complete their investigations. This is enough to test the quality of perseverance and patience of most users in the access regime.
I want to cover three other aspects.
The first one is grievances. Also as part of my law practice, we regularly represent military clients whose submission is grievances. In a six-page brief that I prepared for distribution to members in both English and French, I've provided you with examples that we have come across over the last 90 days in the office, specifically on this subject and others.
The grievance system's malfunction at the moment is due, I think, in large part to the extraordinary time taken by the final authority in a grievance process. Who is the final authority? It's the chief of the defence staff.
In my experience, it is not unusual for the CDS to take between four and five years to issue a final decision. Such a prolonged delay leads to great frustration and a feeling held by grievers of being unappreciated and unvalued. Only when the chief of the defence staff signs the final decision is a griever able to go to the Federal Court for a judicial review to get justice.
Finally, I want to talk about the Military Police Complaints Commission. As part of my practice, I also submit complaints to the MPCC on behalf of clients. I have no quarrel with the MPCC. However, as part of the MPCC complaint process, complaints are first sent to the provost marshal in the section called the office of professional standards to examine the complaint. That process takes months and years. By way of example, yesterday I wrote to the chair of the MPCC, explaining that one of the complaints has been sitting with professional standards for two years and four months and the complainant is waiting for a decision by the MPCC.
On that, I'll conclude. I will be happy to take your questions.