Information & Ethics committee  I'll leave it to my colleagues if they would like to. Otherwise, I would just like to say thank you. We appreciate the opportunity to come here. It's not always pleasant to come in front of a committee when you receive an F, but I hope that through the course of the discussion yo

Information & Ethics committee  I will ask Mr. Bernier to answer your question, but I think that the act is very clear when it comes to this. Criteria are set out, and we comply with them.

Information & Ethics committee  Again, I'll let Shelley describe that, because she actually sits on these. But I think the way you've put it is right. What we're trying to avoid is everyone reinventing the wheel for ourselves and doing it in 20 or 30 different places. The idea is that whatever part of the chai

Information & Ethics committee  We have an action plan, so we will table it with the committee.

Information & Ethics committee  That's an interesting question. I'll have to go back to look at it, but I'll take your word that it wasn't in there. I certainly felt, as we looked into the springtime period, that we had quite a bit of attention placed on access to information by virtue of this report and the

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, in general there are lots of consultations with other departments. I'm not sure we have numbers on what goes where. Certainly, anything that had to do with cabinet confidence we would be discussing with PCO, but I'm not aware whether we have any particular numbers. No, we

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, we have made some administrative improvements to try to deal with this. I'll let Pierre explain exactly what these are.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Nancy McMahon, I believe, is on the job.

Information & Ethics committee  It's operational; it's not fully there. There's still room for development in terms of turning it into a records management operation as opposed to a documents processing operation. I'm just looking at the notes here. It appears that it was deployed about 18 months ago, so it's

Information & Ethics committee  One is keeping track of documents, but then there's also records management--in other words, how you manage those documents that you have. That's the part of it that we haven't fully developed.

Information & Ethics committee  I would say that we've made very significant progress on it, but we're looking to do a little bit more.

Information & Ethics committee  Directionally, I think I would agree with that. As to how much, I don't know. It depends on the type of information. You can't put everything out there, and there will always be certain things that will have to come in through the request route. My bet is that there is an interse

Information & Ethics committee  I guess there are several reasons for the increase in the number of cases. I think that, over the last few years, Canadians have become more interested in the environment, especially last year, when the Copenhagen Conference, among others, was held. I think that people are more

Information & Ethics committee  I'll let Pierre elaborate on what's out there, but we see the need in the current environment to have a specific training program for our department. As we mentioned earlier, there's a common element of knowing what the Access to Information Act is, all of the responsibilities, e

Information & Ethics committee  I think they're related, but they're two different issues as well. We have had some success in taking some of the information that we've had and looking for ways to get it out into the public domain. This has the effect, to the extent that people know about it, of reducing the nu