Information & Ethics committee  It's because they understand, they read the signals. They read the signals from the centre, the Clerk of the Privy Council, the deputy minister, the assistant deputy minister, or director general. There's a higher penalty to be paid if you're zealous in releasing records that yo

Information & Ethics committee  It hasn't been looked at, and I agree that Citizenship and Immigration is one of the departments that has received the most requests and one that is the most complained against. It's one of the 10 most complained-against departments. No doubt if we were to open it up to the publi

Information & Ethics committee  In terms of the demands, if we look at the 70,000 existing requests now in the system, let alone any new ones, with many of the requests my own office makes, we daily receive letters back from departments authorizing themselves delays of 180 days or 200 days to respond. Then we

Information & Ethics committee  In conceptual terms, yes, but I have a major problem. We have to fix it first, because it doesn't work now. Limited as it is, it doesn't work. Second, we want to be restrictive, as much as I am for access. Otherwise, if I have a large contract where the contractors provide some

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  At the moment, the Information Commissioner in fact investigates and provides findings and recommendation to the institution. If the institution decides not to go with the findings or recommendations and decides not release the records, then the requester has the choice to go to

Information & Ethics committee  I will take a more philosophical aspect to it. In conceptual terms, I have no problem making it universal. It is certainly done in the U.S. and in the U.K. However, as a Canadian I certainly would like to have my share first, and, second, have my requests or my complaints handled

Information & Ethics committee  In the earlier editions of the book I mentioned, I recommended among other things that the Governor General's chancellery, which grants medals and honours, be subject to the act. Court administrative services—not decisions or transcription of notes, but administrative support—sho

Information & Ethics committee  In my brief I've given you an outline, which I obtained via an access request, of the staff and its composition. When I come up with 28 investigators and 14 lawyers being in the access to information office, I consider them to be the front end, the people who actually conduct the

Information & Ethics committee  I don't think so. With 78,000, the public is not abusing it on a daily basis. The fees in fact are cumbersome. The U.S. and the U.K., among others, don't have those. Fees prevent one from submitting a request electronically because you have to send a cheque. Most people today, th

Information & Ethics committee  If I can be blunt for a moment, and I think it's my task to be so, your predecessors in office, going back a long time, under the Joe Clark government in 1979, listened and had a green paper on access, and they looked at various options including order-giving. On the other end of

Information & Ethics committee  In a former life I was executive secretary of National Defence headquarters. The coordinator of access to information worked for me, and I worked for the deputy ministers and the Chief of the Defence Staff and related on a daily basis with the chief of staff to the minister. Basi

Information & Ethics committee  Once upon a time they were together and had a common administrative service, from 1983 until about 2001—if my memory serves me correctly, though I could be off by a year or two. There was one director for corporate services, one director for human resources, and we were looking a

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for this introduction. Thank you also, members of this committee, for giving me the honour to appear before you this morning. Let me begin by saying that I have been interested in the administration of the Access to Information Act since 1992, as a requester

National Defence committee  It's quite simple. You have two experts in two separate fields telling you it needs to be changed, to be addressed, and to be more sensitive to and compliant with our charter itself. You've alluded to tradition. Our summary trial is a carbon copy and flows from the U.K. militar