Information & Ethics committee  If you'll bear with me, I can take you through all that with the greatest transparency. I can do both, but in what order? Would you like me to answer the personnel question or--

Information & Ethics committee  Can I start with the good news? As you recall, the committee took a very direct interest in the human resources state of my office last spring and we said at that time that we were severely understaffed due to a very severe problem of retirement, flow-through, people moving on, etc., in spite of having a fairly generous budget.

Information & Ethics committee  I'd have to look into the report. I don't remember that it was, but it doubtless could have been under Canadian law.

Information & Ethics committee  And we have some material on the backlog.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know. I simply don't know personal information about who was in the database.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, to the best of my recollection, Mr. Chairman, I appeared twice. Once was with the director general of elections to talk generally about the use of identifiers and how they were handled in the context of defining who was an eligible voter. That was with the House of Commons committee.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, absolutely. That's what our staff does.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, once we had announced our intention to audit and once my staff began to discuss this with the RCMP, they came to the conclusion with us that many years after 9/11--it was set up in the context of 9/11, in the months following 9/11--they didn't need that particular information in an exempt bank and could therefore close it down.

Information & Ethics committee  I haven't reread our audit report since we launched it, but as I understand it, it was information that was no longer relevant to their needs; it was no longer useful. This was information that they thought might have been of strategic importance in 2001, but certainly isn't now.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know on what particular database Mr. Arar may have been.

Information & Ethics committee  There are two main things. One is that the Canadian approach is of great appeal. The privacy world is divided into three groups: people who don't have privacy legislation, then there are people who take an approach like the European Union does, and then the approach of the United States, which doesn't have overall privacy legislation.

Information & Ethics committee  I believe we do, Mr. Chairman. We distributed some in the context of the appearance for the supplementary estimates, so we have that on human resources, which we could distribute to you.

Information & Ethics committee  I in fact get a lot of information from the same sources as other Canadians. I may just get specialized information a little sooner from some of the studies that we do. We know that Canadians are very concerned about how their personal information is handled. They're concerned about security.

Information & Ethics committee  No, I think with what they know now, they're concerned and they're not satisfied with how their personal information is protected. One indicator of that is the tremendous interest in recent years in the work of my office, both in the public and the private sector. Parents are worried about their children's privacy because the children spend all their time online now.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I do.