Information & Ethics committee  Well, for example, we sent them the roster of executive members of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting and asked CBC if any of those people were on the CBC's payroll or had received public contracts, or if they were in any way beholden to the CBC. And they refused to answer. We

Information & Ethics committee  There was a Radio Canada documentary on the Nordiques—and here I should mention that we are actively opposed to the idea of spending public funds for a hockey arena in Quebec City—that coincided with some political activity in Quebec City and we thought the timing was suspicious.

Information & Ethics committee  We just want to know what it cost.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. We are just like any other research organization or your caucus researchers. After you hit your head against a brick wall and you realize that they're never going to answer any of the requests, you don't bother filing them. We could have filed 100 requests and had all 100

Information & Ethics committee  And in fairness to the CBC, we have had very public scraps--very nasty, ugly public scraps--with the government over its access to information. We were invited to appear here. We didn't apply to come here and dump on the CBC today; we were asked to come and share our experience.

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  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  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