Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Drapeau has made a big point about the 2% of appeals. It's true that only 2% of cases go to appeal, but the impact on the 78,000 cannot be ignored. Somebody referred to the 1,110-day delay that the Department of Defence arrogated to itself. I went to a court case and finally

Information & Ethics committee  Within Canada, you mean?

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not sure. My history with this goes back, but not right back to the beginning of it in 1983. I think that for the last 15 years at least the culture has not been a positive one. We have reports going back which show that. If you take requests, you can see that. It might go ba

Information & Ethics committee  I think there are a number of layers to that. For me the law and the culture interact very seamlessly. If the law allows you to set a long time limit for responding to a request without essentially any accountability—and Mr. Drapeau has described quite well how that works, beca

Information & Ethics committee  We were also very surprised when we saw that they had taken top spot, as it were. Slovenia is in the second spot, and a lot of the former Yugoslavia countries have really high ratings because they sort of all learned together to produce group laws. Their law—I would have to look

Information & Ethics committee  Our right-to-information rating has 61 separate indicators, which reflect international standards around timelines, around exceptions, around appeal mechanisms. It's a potted version: things are more complicated than the 61 indicators, but they will at least point you to the issu

Information & Ethics committee  We've been moving excessively cautiously for 30 years with this act. I think now we have to not do that. A lot of countries cover publicly funded bodies and bodies that perform a public function. Yes, it is a change. I think the implication would be that if you want to do busine

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, certainly.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, we would provide key points on that.

Information & Ethics committee  The first point is that the experience in other countries, as we already heard from Sweden, is that the number of formal requests is very low. Unfortunately, people are not as interested in us as we might wish they were, and I think we can see that the burden from that side could

Information & Ethics committee  My main point about Newfoundland and Labrador was that they undertook a comprehensive process of reform, where they really looked root and branch at the legislation, at what to change and so on, and ended up with legislation that is very substantially stronger than their legislat

Information & Ethics committee  First of all, yes, that is exactly my position. Second, I would note that although there are a few places that don't have order-making power, particularly where some of the older laws were adopted in Europe and Canada, in most of the more modern jurisdictions, access to informati

Information & Ethics committee  Under international standards, exceptions should conform to a three-part test. The first part of the test is that they should protect legitimate interests. We heard from the Swedish ambassador that they have a list of seven principles in their law that responds to seven categorie

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you at a distance. I hope Ottawa has recovered from its recent snowfall. In Halifax we're used to snowfalls and slush like that, so we have some sympathy for you. I'll give you a couple of introductory comments about my organizat