Information & Ethics committee  I'm the Access to Information Commissioner. What I can say is that if Bill C-58 and proposed section 6 remain as they stand, it will be a lot more difficult for first nations to access the information they need to establish land claims and to establish some past events they might

Information & Ethics committee  As I don't have the newspaper article you are referencing on hand, or the date, or the particular file, it is difficult for me to answer the question intelligently. At first glance, nothing in Bill C-58 focuses on political interference. We have conducted a few investigations i

Information & Ethics committee  Unless I am mistaken, Mr. Dubourg, your question is about requests that are frivolous, vexatious or made in bad faith.

Information & Ethics committee  I have been the information commissioner for eight years and, to my knowledge, there have been very few such cases. That is really on the margin of the access to information system. That said, I want to come back to what Mr. Baylis was trying to convince me of earlier. It is tru

Information & Ethics committee  I am listening to them. In fact, if you really wanted to look at the types of requests they get at CIC and CBSA, that might not be a problem for them because, as they have testified, most of the requests at CIC are really about the status—

Information & Ethics committee  No. I'm saying that the bulk of the requests in those two institutions deal with very specific matters.

Information & Ethics committee  I think it's a regression for access to information rights generally.

Information & Ethics committee  I think it's important to recognize that these provisions would not apply only to one department. They apply across the system, to over 250 institutions.

Information & Ethics committee  It's fair to say, yes. The total number of pages provided to Canadians last year, according to government statistics, is a little under seven million.

Information & Ethics committee  That's the total for all institutions across the system.

Information & Ethics committee  I have the exact number here for last year. It was 6,966,589.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, that's true.

Information & Ethics committee  No.

Information & Ethics committee  I am the Information Commissioner. I don't make the access to information requests. Requesters make the access to information requests. Governments have to respond to access to information requests—

Information & Ethics committee  You can see that it's perfectly understandable for government institution representatives to say that these are good amendments, because it allows them not to process access requests that they are currently processing—