Information & Ethics committee  Well, don't get me wrong, but I'd be very happy to see a help desk at a provincial and even a municipal level too. A lot of it has to do with the vast array of records at the federal level and the fact that many of them don't have as concrete a relationship to a community as would provincial or municipal records.

Information & Ethics committee  It's my hope that as we start to get greater and greater machine learning in AI.... I know that we're seeing some research out here on the west coast from our universities about how certain documents will be able to be scanned and read with it, but we're still some time away. All you can start to do now is to build a better system that is going to enable better record-keeping and more clearly accessible record-keeping.

Information & Ethics committee  Having used [Technical difficulty—Editor] national archives many times, I can say that there probably is some kind of a relationship between ATIP and archive law to facilitate, perhaps, a greater declassification of records as they enter the archives.

Information & Ethics committee  I would agree with Mr. Wernick about, of course, the usage. I would say, however, that probably one of the reasons journalists only comprise around 10% of the user base of the law is that they feel frustration with it, and they largely just don't try.

Information & Ethics committee  I would simply repeat a couple of them that I think are the most important ones. One has to do with the sense of delay and the investment that's necessary in order to make sure there is the infrastructure to make the provision of the law more efficient. The second part, I think, would have to do with proactive disclosure across a wider range of documentation and records to make sure that journalists and other researchers don't have to resort to using the law for things that ought to be rather routinely available.

Information & Ethics committee  I teach it, and I can tell you that in three hours, it's very difficult, even with graduate-level students, to walk them through the process. I can only imagine what it's like for a typical citizen to try to wade through all of this. Tutorials, any number of videos, any number of how-tos, I think would be helpful for the average citizen to try to work through it.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, it would be the ultimate judo move. I love the approach that they're taking. They're still having troubles in Germany with that approach, because an awful lot of companies have raised their hands and said that there's a great deal of commercial confidence that is potentially leaking into the system.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, they have that full right.

Information & Ethics committee  I've used the American law hundreds of times, and I think there is simply a different culture of disclosure in the United States with it's government. There is, I think, kind of an inherent...whether it's libertarianism or a certain suspicion of the power of government. As a result, it's freedom of information law, which predates ours—I think it goes back to 1971—is a far more fulsome provider of information to the public.

Information & Ethics committee  Oh, I don't know. I think there's a 15-way tie for first place on that one. I don't know that there's necessarily one that is a barrier. It used to be cost. Now, I think it would be delays, because the act seems to serve as a slightly better tool of history than of journalism.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, when it comes to the cabinet confidences, in British Columbia they are 15-year confidences. They're not 20 years, the way they are federally. That permits us to look at records that cabinet would have deliberated on or decided upon earlier; we can go back 15 years. One of the central problems is that outside of that Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa window, the law isn't used all that much out here.

Information & Ethics committee  I will say there are a couple of things we used to do that we don't do any longer. We used to ask, under the act, for the process of responding to requests and how long those requests would stay in a deputy minister's office, or even a minister's office, before coming to us. It provided a little bit of accountability that way, shaming, if that was necessary.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm in support of.... I think the Information Commissioner has basically said that there ought to be a cap on the amount of time that a delay could take place. I would be open, as I think most journalists would, to partial disclosure and a kind of rolling file that would come out.

Information & Ethics committee  “Bad faith” is a subjective term, as are terms like “vexatious”. We'd certainly not want to give a blanket to that without quite clearly understanding the criteria. I saw some of the criteria of the Information Commissioner around this, but I would hold the fort on that before seeing a pretty extensive list of criteria to ensure that what we're getting are truly vexatious requests.

Information & Ethics committee  It's definitely a worry, as has been the introduction of technology to let public and political staff obviate normal requests. I think, though, that it can be countered to some degree with a much wider amount of proactive disclosure of certain records.