Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Following the time of the tabling of the bill and the bill going through Parliament, we were in touch with department and agency officials and gave them information on doing a PIA. We referred them to the Treasury Board website, where there's extensive information on doing that.

Information & Ethics committee  There are both types. They can change for a permanent job, and some can come for a year or two.

Information & Ethics committee  That takes us, I guess, back into the history of the funding of the office. When PIPEDA was originally voted for in 2000, it didn't have permanent funding, because nobody knew how it was going to play out. So I think that's a comment that not only was the base stabilized, but also that there was a need for various things such as technological experts, and a need to communicate with our international colleagues in terms of the technological applications that are being rolled out throughout the world, and various things like that, including having technical advisers in a lot of the different branches to have a hands-on approach to doing either investigations or audits in an updated way.

Information & Ethics committee  We've seen a very positive take-up. The first year when we had voluntary data breach disclosure--and this may not be accurate, from memory--there were something like 25 self-reported disclosures. I think there were 69 last year. As always with such things, one wonders if there wasn't a lot of activity going on that wasn't reported, and what this reflects--more cooperation with my office, greater data breaches, it's hard to say.

Information & Ethics committee  One of the things I'm very concerned about is taking the office out of Ottawa, which is not home to a great number of Canadians, and out to the places where people are living and working. On the money we've had for regional presence, we're not the size to have an office. But I think it's very important, because in all fields you have to maintain personal contacts.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, that is more or less it.

Information & Ethics committee  As I told your colleague, the Privacy Commissioner's budget has increased significantly in the last five years. We are going to start by using all the resources we have been given to recruit and train 178 people, and keep them to the extent possible, given the extremely mobile labour market.

Information & Ethics committee  Not really, no.

Information & Ethics committee  The recommendation is quite straightforward because the powers that I am asking for are already in the legislation that is before a parliamentary committee. It is not a very bold request. It is something that I hope to see in the new legislation, something, in fact, that is already there.

Information & Ethics committee  They were identified in a number of ways: by looking at the complaints, certainly the phone calls and the letters, everything that came into the office as to what Canadians were concerned about, and polling that we do annually; by looking at the evolution of the outside environment in terms of new technologies about to be put on the market; by looking at the media; and by reviewing some of the work that has been done for us by various experts on some of these issues.

Information & Ethics committee  There are quite a few. Let me refer to various things. I believe that I talked about the genetic information.

Information & Ethics committee  I mentioned that there are jobs not filled. In terms of information technology, one of the things we want to do this year is hire and train enough people within our office to better assess the privacy impact of new information technologies coming on stream every day. Another thing is to increase public awareness of technologies that have potential impacts on privacy, which means putting out information for the public.

Information & Ethics committee  No, it hasn't been contemplated in those numbers, because the numbers are based on our legal responsibilities and obligations now. We don't have a specific public education mandate for the Privacy Act, which was adopted in 1983. We give information on it, of course, minimal information, but we don't undertake these public education campaigns with outside partners, such as organizations or provinces, because we're not specifically funded for that.

Information & Ethics committee  A significant portion of the increase was to deal with the increasing sophistication of privacy threats, the issues of new technologies, which are very hard to understand, first of all, and then hard to investigate or monitor, and for international cooperation on them, because they are technologies that usually come from outside Canada.

Information & Ethics committee  No, we haven't. The threat risk assessment was just to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner against spam attacks, electronic attacks, or spoofing; or people penetrating who are not employees, getting access to our computer network where people's complaints are and things like that.