Mr. Speaker, with regard to parts (a) (i) and (iv), total expenditures on outside lawyers or legal advice and Department of Justice lawyers can be found in the public accounts of Canada archive, where information is broken down by fiscal year, April 1 to March 31. This information can be found in Volume III: Additional Information and Analyses, Detailed information Section 3: Professional and special services, under the category “Legal Services”.
With regard to parts (a) (ii) and (iii), Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada or CIRNAC, and Indigenous Services Canada or ISC do not hire in-house or departmental lawyers.
Concerning part (b), with regard to (a)(ii) and (iii), CIRNAC and ISC do not hire in-house or departmental lawyers.
Concerning part (b), with regard to (a) (i) and (iv), and parts (c) and (d), CIRNAC concluded that the information requested is not centrally tracked in a system and would require extensive manual research to produce and validate a comprehensive response to this question. This would not be possible in the time allotted and could lead to the disclosure of incomplete and misleading information.