Information & Ethics committee  Again, Mr. Chairman, I would ask the indulgence of the committee. The report on the CAIRS investigation should be out fairly soon, and I would prefer to make comments once the investigation is complete. Certainly it will be something I will post on the website. If the committee wishes to have me back to answer questions, I would be more than happy to do so.

Information & Ethics committee  I think Canada was at the forefront of proactive disclosure about 10 years ago when we started posting travel and hospitality and expenses. It was definitely something that was in advance of other jurisdictions. Other jurisdictions are either putting that in legislation now or they're emulating those types of disclosures.

Information & Ethics committee  I think also that this is a major resource issue within institutions. We're going through this process ourselves, and it needs serious education, serious commitment within the institution, and serious discipline in order to have sound information management practices, particularly with electronic documents.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chairman, I'm trying to look at my report to see where I said that there was a lack of will. I can't find it, nor do I remember it. So I'm not sure I stated that. I think what I said that's being most widely disseminated is that the right of access to information “is at risk of being totally obliterated because delays threaten to render the entire access regime irrelevant in our current information economy”.

Information & Ethics committee  That's what I think. And that was the point, because that paragraph specifically refers to the delays we're experiencing in dealing with access to information requests, which is a reactive mode of disclosing information in the context of today's technological environment. That's what this sentence was referring to.

Information & Ethics committee  I can't comment on what the clerk meant; I'm simply reading from his report. But information is global. Development and use of information is global. It really transcends boundaries. You know what the social media is doing. Everybody's interacting on an instant basis, and people are commenting and people are interacting automatically.

Information & Ethics committee  The policies are well in place in terms of duty to record. There have been proposals for amendments to have a positive legal obligation to create a record. To me, as long as the policies are being implemented appropriately and people are held accountable for whether or not these records are created, whether it's in the legislation...

Information & Ethics committee  We'll see how it goes.

Information & Ethics committee  I just thought it was a really long presentation, and I thought it was well-known to this committee in any event.

Information & Ethics committee  No.

Information & Ethics committee  You're referring to the British Columbia commissioner's proposals?

Information & Ethics committee  Basically the idea is that you do what's commonly known as an access impact assessment. The idea is to think about disclosure of information when you create documents, when you start developing policies and programs. One of the difficulties now is with the complexity of government, which is not only done horizontally across departments but also multi-jurisdictionally, i.e. federal, provincial, territorial, aboriginal governments, and in the private sector.

Information & Ethics committee  Certainly, we can provide a list of potential witnesses to the committee. As I said, we did endeavour to contact a few people in the U.K., the U.S., and Australia, before coming here today, but we couldn't reach everyone. We do have the list of questions and we will provide that to the committee in bilingual format as a preliminary step.

Information & Ethics committee  It depends on the circumstances. I think the way to go about it from each institution... You see, each institution knows its own information holding and they have to make their own determination based on the Access to Information Act and based on the protection of personal information.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, Mr. Chairman, these are the ones we extracted in terms of embarking on a process of open government. There are more details to this in the sense that, for instance, in the Australian task force recommendations, they recommend who should be the people who are going to be developing an open government strategy.