Information & Ethics committee  I think all those concerns are valid, and I would encourage the committee to look with an open mind at all the possibilities, at this point, and all the factors that should be considered. I have a few comments. First of all, when I came to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner

Information & Ethics committee  I think it was constituents or different electoral....

Information & Ethics committee  Like different ridings....

Information & Ethics committee  People were labelled as they made the requests. We heard many insinuations of people thinking that somehow their access to information requests were treated in a partisan way. I don't say we ever got proof of that. I remember that the minister honestly thought that this was help

Information & Ethics committee  There was a counter-narrative.

Information & Ethics committee  Perhaps the committee should know that at some points we probe very deeply into the process, not just the law, but what is really happening. One of the innovative things we did was to poll anonymously the coordinators and the participants in the system to see how autonomous they

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, but then there are other sections of access to information about third-party information that are very important that come into effect.

Information & Ethics committee  Could I add, Mr. Chair, that this question came up in Quebec about 20 years ago, and by the time it got to the Court of Appeal it was maybe 15 years ago. The principle that was retained under the law and that was proven in the case of Hydro-Québec International was that it was ef

Information & Ethics committee  I have made some notes on this, thinking it was one of the interesting things we did. We mentioned, as I referred to earlier, that the public interest includes not only health and safety or environmental factors—chemicals in a river or something like that—but also good governance

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. The privacy parts were the poor cousins of the existing legislation. People had relatively few rights of recourse to the commissioner, so we tidied that up. However, our work in Newfoundland was not really so much about personal information. There are large parts about per

Information & Ethics committee  I won't speak directly to that. I think the present Privacy Commissioner can certainly inform you about that. But there was a government study made of that in 2005, with a very important Supreme Court justice who recommended keeping the offices separate. On the other hand, I no

Information & Ethics committee  Doug, could you go back to the slide entitled “Modernizing the law”? I say so because I would just like to add that the recommendation of the duty to document, wherever it is contained in terms of the statute, is part of a suite of recommendations that we made, which include th

Information & Ethics committee  Being the only non-Newfoundlander who was honoured to be on this committee, I would say that the actions of the government in passing this Bill 29, which was repealed by the committee we served on, was akin to the government's giving itself, giving the cabinet, a sort of veto pow

Information & Ethics committee  I have had the advantage of working provincially and federally in both tribunal systems and the ombudsman system. The current flaws of both of those systems are not really in their legal aspects, but in the fact that the legislation that sets them up does not create a balance bet

Information & Ethics committee  I would encourage you to ask why a government veto ought to be used rather than having a conditional preliminary conclusion by the commissioner, the tribunal, pending an appeal to the federal court. The court is used to dealing with national security issues, international issues,