What I found about reporting requirements is that, if you mow the lawn, the grass comes back. There are all kinds of people asking for data. They can be Treasury Board analysts who want to know about something. There can be a flap in Parliament, with all due respect, about an issue like fire protection, and people want to know about it, and the only way to know is to go and ask for data from first nations about what's going on. We don't have a lot of other sources to use, other than the census, which only comes around every five years. Our way to get information on what's going on out there is often to ask for reports to be sent to us. Sometimes, if you send money, you attach reporting conditions and so on.
There's lots of pull for more data, more reports. You have to really lean against it and say, “What do you need it for? Who's going to read it? What are you going to do with it?” and create some checks and balances to stop that.
I have taken one of my very senior people with a lot of field experience and put him full time on the issue of reporting burden. I told him, “Don't mow the grass; tell me where the roots are; what can we do to stop this proliferation of reports?” We've gone deep into the plumbing of our data collection instruments and where this comes from. I think we are making a lot of headway on that and we've stopped the growth of reporting requirements and have started to prune things, asking whether anybody is going to read something and what they are going to do with it. We ask, would it make a difference, would it help parliamentarians, would it help Canadians understand what's going on here?
Over the next year for sure, I think we'll see a dramatic drop in the number of reports, but I concur entirely with the observation of Mr. Wiersema. That's great. It really takes some of the load off administrators in band governments, but it's because we have very few other ways to get information that we do so much of that.