Government Operations committee  Thank you.

Government Operations committee  No, that's not what I was trying to say. The access to information software that enables us to work on documents is often part of the secret network. Since it is on the secret network, people who work from home right now have no access to their main work tool. If the software wa

Government Operations committee  If you look at the annual report for each year, you will see that we have statistics for different departments. The delays are absolutely worrisome. As I was saying earlier, the number of complaints received last year relative to delays and extensions has increased tremendously.

Government Operations committee  It's difficult to tell. Every department is very different. I've been having great success collaborating with some leaders, and others less so. I find that the analysts, the coordinators, the people working in access believe in transparency and really want to provide information.

Government Operations committee  No. Only 1% of all annual requests are related to a complaint. The tangent is the same every year. We have seen an increase of about 25% annually, in addition to normal complaints. So the 1% becomes 1.25%, then 1.5%. It is a gradual increase. It is always going up.

Government Operations committee  Consultations with third parties create tremendous delays, as do consultations among departments. There currently seems to be a trend toward adding a provision to contracts with third parties to specify that all information will be divulged or accessible. Of course, there are cer

Government Operations committee  Yes. Like any other institution in government, we have a department plan and a department report. Every year, we provide how we did, what our priorities were and how we successfully closed files. We have some metrics on timelines. Luckily, we've been very good at reducing our tim

Government Operations committee  We've done very, very well with our own changes, as I said earlier, making innovative changes too, but at some point there is only so much we can do. At some point, we need more bodies to do the work.

Government Operations committee  Speaking for my own institution, where we're dealing with complaints about access requests, I can say that we've been working really hard to have a better innovative system. We are now scanning every document so that every file we receive is accessible electronically. This is one

Government Operations committee  We definitely have seen COVID being used as a reason not to respond to some of my investigations. We've seen COVID used to ask for extensions. That's part of our investigation right now: What is going to be the impact? It's going to be difficult at this point to know the full i

Government Operations committee  It's resources.

Government Operations committee  I don't know what to say to that. I believe that every department should have their ATIP access units as part of their essential services, especially when they're dealing with information related to a crisis like this. Either it should be through ATIP or it should be proactivel

Government Operations committee  Thank you.

Government Operations committee  For my own agency, we've had the same budget with the same number of employees for the last six years, and our complaints have increased by 25% every year. If you're not able to respond to the demand, I guess that's one way to look at it. Normally, my office receives 2,400 compl

Government Operations committee  Yes, it's a small percentage. I think most Canadians know that they're not entitled to see cabinet confidence documents, so they rarely complain about that specific exclusion unless it's part of a package. Most of the time, it's because it's not just the cabinet confidence but ot