Information & Ethics committee  Our report indicates that nothing would be terrible about it. We recommended a much more open regime, and the structure we put in place in the legislation we drafted provides for a much more open regime. However, it doesn't provide for a totally open regime. Government still has

Information & Ethics committee  Government—

Information & Ethics committee  There are two critical factors in the decision. One is that you can't be held properly to account, as government should be held fully to account to the public, if the decisions and activities of government are not properly documented. There's nothing to release. You can't ask in

Information & Ethics committee  No, I don't have any doubts about it. Everything government does, in the end, must be in the public interest, or government shouldn't do it. That's the standard I would apply. If it's not in the public interest, government shouldn't be involved, because it's in the private or p

Information & Ethics committee  There would be different considerations to different parts of it. If you're just thinking about the resolution part, whether it's a hybrid or order-making model. I don't see there being any great difficulty moving from your present ombudsman model to a hybrid model. I would thi

Information & Ethics committee  The commissioner would have a better basis for expressing an opinion on that than I would. I don't see why the numbers make the difference on that issue. There are obvious circumstances where numbers do make a difference, but what's the difference if you have to make 70,000 ord

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I think he wrote something like 32 decisions in one year.

Information & Ethics committee  It was the average.

Information & Ethics committee  You can charge a certain amount of money beyond 15 hours.

Information & Ethics committee  That was always there. We reduced the burden of collecting the money and accounting for it. For example, there was a requirement to pay a $5 fee, and I believe the federal system still has that. You still pay a $5 fee. The cost of receiving, recording, treating, banking, and admi

Information & Ethics committee  You have to think of the overall public interest. The general public of Canada or of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, whichever you're dealing with, has an interest in making sure government expends its funds wisely and soundly and doesn't waste them. Why should a part

Information & Ethics committee  That's part of it.

Information & Ethics committee  It's an easy step. You just switch the burdens. We've stayed with the ombudsman model where what the commissioner directs is a recommendation. The public servant has to comply, unless it goes to court to get an order to set it aside.

Information & Ethics committee  There was no recommendation to us and no complaint about that system. It worked fairly well. As a matter of fact, the privacy side of it had been enacted only a short time before. It started out as being just a statute with respect to access to information, and the privacy sectio

Information & Ethics committee  It could be applied nationally as well.