Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to remind my hon. colleague that actually I represent the riding of North Vancouver, not West Vancouver. It is just across the river.
I would like to thank the member for Vancouver Quadra for raising the important issue of access to information. The member seems to be preoccupied with this issue and has asked a number of questions about how our system works. Allow me to take this opportunity to explain how requests for information are decided by the government and released to the public.
First, as has been explained many times by our government, requests for information are never handled by ministers or their political staff, not today, not yesterday, not ever. In fact, they are handled and responded to by dedicated and professional public service employees who have the delegated authority under the Access to Information Act to do that work.
In addition, each federal institution is responsible for ensuring that it complies with all relevant laws, guidelines and directives. This includes laws such as the Access to Information Act, which gives Canadian citizens, permanent residents, or any person or corporation present in Canada a right to access information that is contained in government records.
This is how our system of government works and I know that there has been a lot of confusion about this.
Many believe or think that everything should be run by a single organization. Some would like to see one big central governing body put in charge of all federal organizations and institutions. This central body would tell institutions what to do, how to do it and when to do it. It would also be able to answer every conceivable question about what is happening in every single institution in the federal government, right down to the number of paper clips in stock.
Such an organization simply does not exist in our system. I can understand that it would make our lives as parliamentarians a lot easier. Whenever we want to get to the bottom of something, we would simply summon officials from this central body and bombard them with questions. Fortunately, that is not how things work. If we ran the government in this way, it would be hugely impractical. After all, we are talking about the largest enterprise in Canada by far. There are over 250 organizations in the federal public sector working in organizations such as departments, separate agencies, crown corporations and agents of Parliament, and I would add that the vast majority of these organizations are now covered by the Access to Information Act, thanks to this government.
When our government took power in 2006, we made a commitment to improve transparency and accountability, and we delivered with the Federal Accountability Act. The act contained the most extensive amendments to the Access to Information Act since it came into force in 1983. Most importantly, it broadened the reach of the act to more public institutions, including agents of Parliament such as the Information Officer and the Auditor General, and crown corporations such as the CBC, Canada Post and VIA Rail. All told, the Federal Accountability Act added 70 additional public institutions to the list of those covered by the legislation.
As a result, there are now some 255 public organizations subject to the access to information law, and let me repeat my earlier point that each one of these organizations is responsible for complying with the Access to Information Act. This is not to say that they do not have any support or that they are allowed to do whatever they want. The Treasury Board Secretariat provides the policies, directives, best practices and training needed to support the access to information community, and each department must report to Parliament on its activities. These detailed reports include statistics on the number of requests received, completed, processed and released, as well as the compliance rates.
Our government also continues to work with the Information Commissioner to ensure that Canadians have access to information about their government. We welcome the member's suggestions to Parliament on how and where we can improve the management of access to information.