Information & Ethics committee  Thank you so much, Madam Chair. My name is Gregory Thomas. I represent the Canadian Taxpayers Federation as its federal and Ontario director. We are a non-partisan, not-for-profit political advocacy group. We have about 70,000 supporters across the country. We've been around f

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Julian, I have to apologize. I'm--

Information & Ethics committee  Well, our experience is that CBC is among the worst. It just seems to have a blanket disregard for the legislation and it ignores the directions of the Information Commissioner, who is a non-partisan officer with no axe to grind. It went to court. It lost in Federal Court and no

Information & Ethics committee  I haven't studied the PMO issue. It related, I believe, to personal agendas and things of that nature. It wasn't our specific access to information request. We didn't ask for the Prime Minister's agendas and stuff, and I didn't specifically follow that case.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, and we called for that publicly, along with Newspapers Canada and the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association. The individual in question threatened us with legal action. We're still waiting for his writ and would welcome the opportunity to litigate that with tha

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not a lawyer, so I wouldn't know how to characterize it, but we welcome the opportunity to meet him in court, if that's what he wants to do. We were disturbed that no one has been prosecuted under the access to information laws. We believe that when there are egregious exampl

Information & Ethics committee  I think that, in this case, the employee is no longer with Canada's public service and that the legal commitment between him and our organization is private.

Information & Ethics committee  We finally asked them to provide us with the name of their CEO and the address of their head office.

Information & Ethics committee  We could have, but we wanted to make a point.

Information & Ethics committee  That is correct. That is one of the major functions of our access to information applications, following up on information we get from our supporters and also from government employees. For example, in Manitoba we heard they were getting big flatscreen TVs and violent video games

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, and in my opening remarks I addressed that. I think it's unconscionable that government agencies all funded by the same people are using the courts to pursue internal bickering. We believe that the CBC should honour the access to information legislation. We believe that sho

Information & Ethics committee  I think there is a fair amount of common sense on the exemptions. Nobody thinks the public should be invited to CSIS security briefings, nobody thinks the public should get to view military exercises, and nobody thinks the public should sit in on cabinet discussions or that the c

Information & Ethics committee  I don't think anybody figures that CTV should get to look at CBC's programming schedule ideas. And I think that if the CBC had just stuck to those reasonable things, then they wouldn't be--

Information & Ethics committee  CBC has advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages it has is the $1.16 billion head start it has on its competitors by way of public subsidy. That's a big advantage. The entire budget for some of these other channels is like a rounding error on the CBC's budget. You coul

Information & Ethics committee  About half a dozen.