Government Operations committee  Exactly. Right now, in a lot of ways the public service is trapped in a spiral of silence. People don't speak up because other people don't speak up, so the spiral of silence continues. We get this secrecy in the federal government around wrongdoing. It really should be everyone's business, including the public's.

Government Operations committee  To pick up on my colleagues' points, I think we also need to legally mandate the release of broad categories of public records to get it out of the access to information system and simply put it in the public domain. Another thing is that a lot of these changes shouldn't require enormous amounts of time.

Government Operations committee  Universally, most of the ministries, most of the departments in government do have these kinds of problems. It's not necessarily exclusive to one department or another. What we see in the statistics, when it comes to access to information in this country, is that all of them—all of them, without exception—are dealing with transparency problems and a lack of transparency.

Government Operations committee  Yes, the Information Commissioner did, and we've seen.... You can check Info Source. It includes those statistics on a department-by-department basis. Some are worse than others. We see, for example, significant problems in Immigration. The Department of Immigration has enormous numbers of requests, and also enormous problems with transparency, probably associated with the volume of requests.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Bron probably would be better.

Government Operations committee  If all the information is there, I certainly haven't had time to look at it all. What we know is that that's not the case. This goes to my earlier point. There's a whole bunch of information out there that government not only does not release, but also fails to collect. What we see time and time again from the federal government, and also provincial governments, is that in a variety of areas—not just COVID, but also in anything that government regulates and touches—we are simply not collecting the amount of information necessary to make good decisions.

Government Operations committee  We quite literally don't know what we don't know. If people knew more about what was actually going on in government, maybe we would find that the transparency rating is overrated. Again, to Mr. Cutler's point, it's perception, not actuality.

Government Operations committee  Clearly, the pandemic is affecting it in terms of the ability of the public service to actually access records and do their work easily, but we were seeing these kinds of delays even before the pandemic. I think it's a bit of both, but it sort of highlights a structural issue that has existed for a very long time.

Government Operations committee  I would also include one other thing. You asked about what other measures can be done to encourage whistle-blowing and openness. I would also take a look at the secrecy oaths that we have in the public service. If you start off employment by saying everything's confidential, you're not going to get much openness.

Government Operations committee  I'll just add that another thing we should also be taking a look at is greater disclosure by corporations. This is actually something that the federal government started to take a look at in 1978 through the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration. There were some very good recommendations from that royal commission that talked about the need for greater information disclosure, not just from government, but also from these corporations that were getting larger and larger.

Government Operations committee  What we know is that when organizations know they are being watched, they'd behave themselves better. The other interesting thing is that when more information is out there, it allows people outside of government to help the government and to say that it should maybe be looking at this and that maybe it got something wrong.

Government Operations committee  Yes, absolutely. It allows for public pressure to be brought to bear, whether by elected representatives, civil society groups or individual citizens. Knowledge allows for action. Knowledge allows for decision.

Government Operations committee  Perhaps. As I say, we need a large disclosure of records and a law that forces that large disclosure, as well as some of the whistle-blowing recommendations that the COVID-19 Accountability Group is making.

Government Operations committee  I think it's normal, but it shouldn't be happening. The pandemic is exacerbating and illuminating all the existing problems that we see in the transparency system in this country, whether it's whistle-blowing or whether it's treatment of information. We should have a right to that information.

Government Operations committee  I don't know the mind of government, but this should also be an opportunity for us to bring in more transparency measures. Because these problems are being highlighted and illuminated, it creates an opportunity for everyone in this room to raise these issues with their constituents and in Parliament, and to get some better transparency laws than the ones we have had in the past.