Information & Ethics committee  What we experienced in the eliminating of the fees is that requesters will often ask for larger volumes of documents. The institutions have not responded to those volumes as well as we were anticipating. Interestingly, the number of cases we have on delays and time limits is about 1,300 a year.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Proposed section 6, which was asking for the subject matter, the timelines...?

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. That disposition has been removed.

Information & Ethics committee  Actually, there have been about 30 amendments made.

Information & Ethics committee  We have 3,500 old complaints right now in the backlog and in the inventory.

Information & Ethics committee  Right now, with the $3 million extra that we have, we are floating just equally with what we have coming in and what we are finishing. I'm receiving about 2,500 complaints a year and this year we closed 2,600.

Information & Ethics committee  Plus $3 million.

Information & Ethics committee  It keeps going up. From 2014 to date, we started with 1,700 complaints a year, and now we're at about 2,400 to 2,500 a year.

Information & Ethics committee  It's very difficult to know. My office calculated we would need approximately $9 million in one year to hire all the investigators necessary to get rid of the backlog. Even if we were to do that, the institutions would not be able to absorb the extra workload. We need a continuous amount of money coming in for at least five years, so we can work on our backlog, work on new files, but we also need more resources for the institutions to be able to respond to us.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. I am pleased to be here with you today. As you said, Mr. Chair, I am joined by France Labine and Layla Michaud. I now have 15 months under my belt as the new Information Commissioner, and at this point in my mandate, I see very positive signs of progress but also some challenges that lie ahead.

Information & Ethics committee  Unfortunately, given how long it currently takes to process a complaint, I'm sure complainants are happy to receive a response. However, since they don't obtain the response until a year and a half or two years later, the information or records received may not be as relevant. My goal, then, is to reduce that response time so that people receive the information they are looking for when they request it.

Information & Ethics committee  We do that, of course, but it's unfortunate. I don't want things to get to that point. I don't want to have to call complainants to ask whether they still want the information in question since they asked for it eight months ago. I'd like us to be able to call the complainant immediately to ask what information they are looking for exactly.

Information & Ethics committee  It's interesting because technology is at a lot of different levels, and it could be as easy as.... I was surprised when I started my new position that I had only one screen in my office. I was used to using two screens and people were questioning me. However, when you do a paper review, and you have your file on one screen, you can work on your Word document on the other screen, instead of going back, up and down and up and down.

Information & Ethics committee  It's a bit of both. We realized that certain investigators were more compatible with certain institutions or complainants. In those cases, it's not even an issue. Those investigators are assigned the complaints and files from the corresponding individuals. We explored the idea of assigning files by portfolio, but that doesn't always work given that some files involve more than one subject.