Official Languages committee  We, too—

Official Languages committee  We're as passionate as you are about this question. We are working with the communities, and are trying to give them as much money as possible to increase their capacity to welcome these immigrants—to attract them and retain them. It's not easy. You also have quite a job ahead o

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. Good morning, Mr. Chair and members. My name is Stefanie Beck. I am the assistant deputy minister of corporate services at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. I'm joined by Audrey White, the director of our access to information and privacy division. We've

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely.

Information & Ethics committee  I could just say what they said, because, in fact, I think we all approach it the same way. There are really three major aspects: the personnel side, the physical side, and the IT side. We have similar structures in place on the prevention and detection and the auditing to make s

Information & Ethics committee  I think that one is fairly self-evident. When I say we're processing 2.8 million applications annually, if even 10% of those people started to make requests for all of their case files, we would have an enormous amount of work to do. To add to what my colleague from the RCMP sai

Information & Ethics committee  No.

Information & Ethics committee  The acts are all public, and they are online. As I said, about 50 of ours are already online, and we're reviewing to see which others we could put up. The documentation itself isn't classified in any way. There may be parts of it in some instances. You can even read our informati

Information & Ethics committee  We have both agreements under our act, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, as well as formal written agreements on information sharing. In fact, a lot of those are online, and you can read them on our website.

Information & Ethics committee  From a bureaucratic perspective, it's always easier if we have legislative authority to do it without having to negotiate a whole separate agreement, if that's what you're suggesting, in order to operate. If we had to write information-sharing agreements among all of us, there ar

Information & Ethics committee  The same, as I said in our opening remarks, and in fact we've recently revised our PIA templates and guidelines for the officers writing them. I will say they are lengthy and time-consuming. It's not a simple effort. Even if we're doing, say, seven or eight a year, they can be te

Information & Ethics committee  I would just add that our missions abroad are deemed to be in Canada. For a Canadian embassy in Costa Rica, the servers that are in that mission are deemed to be in Canada.

Information & Ethics committee  Shared Services Canada is responsible, of course, but in fact I thought the same did apply to federal data. Certainly when we're undertaking procurement for systems that will have data about Canadians on them, we specify that the servers need to be in Canada.

Information & Ethics committee  I think what is most useful in that process, which includes a necessity test, by the way, for a privacy impact assessment—a “necessity of collection” is part of it. In our conversations with, for instance, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, when we explain what a new program

Information & Ethics committee  Some of those, of course, would be transformed, if I can describe it this way, from ATI requests into P, notwithstanding, I think, that with the $2.8 million, and the fact that it's free, and you could do it online from anywhere.... I don't know that we would see a corresponding