Information & Ethics committee  I think that over the years, the investigative process of privacy has become more and more cumbersome. Maybe more and more the world is designed this way, and we have more procedural fairness. Be that as it may, we now have an investigative process that takes a long time. My sugg

Information & Ethics committee  The foundation should pretty well remain stable. I'm saying five years seems to be cautious and too often. I don't know what the formula should be: 10 years, 15 years, and let it work out. I don't see the urgency to do it every five years. When we're talking about privacy, parti

Information & Ethics committee  I obviously don't agree with the reason given by the Privacy Commissioner in his September letter. I think we should go back to the March letter, in which he argued—and I would support it—that it should be a hybrid position. My position is the same as that of the CBA.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know. I can't read minds. I presume he had a coffee with the Information Commissioner and they had a meeting of the minds. Really, that would be a plausible explanation as to why. Frankly, there should be a similarity of approach. I also said before this committee that t

Information & Ethics committee  I think our public service is very well informed. It is well equipped to provide information and submissions, while bearing in mind privacy issues. This is not too onerous. People know that some of their personal information is recorded in documents belonging to various departm

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for giving me the opportunity to comment on the proposal advanced by the Privacy Commissioner in his letters of March 22 and September 13. For reasons of brevity, and I will be brief, permit me to identify the recommendations with which

Information & Ethics committee  I think that would be the first thing to do. There may be functions that both offices are currently performing that have not been read in the statute. I know this. One is to reform the law. That's not in there. So this has consumed a tremendous amount of resources. There are also

Information & Ethics committee  I think some of them will, yes. Others, no. I made my points in the brief and here today. We can see access to information as a long assembly line. We think you have access to records. Records have to be in existence. They have to be able to be retracted, to be examined for exem

Information & Ethics committee  I don't think they should change. I think the green paper spells it out and has a working system, except there have been some major flaws in it. One of the major flaws is that I think we are over-concentrating on the role. It's important but it's not the only player in the access

Information & Ethics committee  Finally, it boils down to one word: leadership. When Mr. Obama got elected eight years ago, his first act upon reaching the White House was an executive order about freedom of information giving orders throughout the bureaucracy that from then on access was the key. The possibl

Information & Ethics committee  I can address that. As an author, I'm duty bound to look at the past. I think the system changed at the very moment of its actuation. It was basically put in place by a Liberal government at the time—Mr. Trudeau's—but the first government that came under the access regime was the

Information & Ethics committee  The entire request system is bogged down by excessively long turnaround times. As I stated earlier, if I submit a request to a department and it stipulates a turnaround time of 180, 200 or 300 days, I have to decide whether or not to file a complaint. If the turnaround time was l

Information & Ethics committee  As a former public servant and former secretary to the Armed Forces Council, I can tell you that we had problems in two areas. As I recall, the first problems date back to 1986-87, when there were drastic cuts to the administration. We simply lost all the administrative staff tha

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Honestly, I think the recommendation to give the commissioner order-making powers is simplistic in that it would resolve very few of the chief problems. The fact is that 93% of the outstanding requests involve institutions that do not have order-making powers. They have no powers