Mr. Speaker, that is also a very good question. Coincidentally, we are facing that kind of situation in the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, which I chair. Right now, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner has a staff shortage. It has only about 70% of its authorized staff complement and has new responsibilities under the Federal Accountability Act. It has requested and is authorized to have another 20 employees. As it turns out, the privacy commission has had to rely on contracting people in because it cannot hire people quickly enough to fill some of these jobs.
In fact, we found the same thing in the Information Commissioner's office. From my work on the government operations and estimates committee, I have found that this is prevalent in a number of departmental areas where there simply is not the qualified and properly trained staff to discharge the responsibility.
In my conversations and directions to the Privacy Commissioner, I told her that she is asking for increased powers, more sweeping powers for the Privacy Commissioner to report more often and to initiate criminal investigations, et cetera, but she does not have the staff to do it. As a matter of fact, the backlogs in terms of investigations are so large that it is going to take her an awful long time to address them.
Therefore, the member raises a very important question. It is easy to add those powers, but can the responsibility be discharged in a responsible fashion? Can the job be done? There is no point in giving someone the responsibility unless there is the commitment not only of the dollars but of having the capacity in place to discharge those responsibilities. One makes those undertakings to the Canadian people that it is being put in place, and I think the member is quite correct, in that it has to be with the assumption that it can be delivered.