Information & Ethics committee  I don't think the commissioner's office lacks funding. It has a sizable budget. My position is simple: when less than half the people at the commissioner's office are assigned to the administrative task of reviewing complaints, there's a problem from the outset. Let's start by f

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not equipped to answer this question because I don't have the statistics for each one of the departments for their performance level in any given year, so I cannot address that.

Information & Ethics committee  Right from the get-go, we decided as a country, after a white paper on access, that the way to go was to have an Information Commissioner. We did not need to do this. The white paper had other options. In the States, for instance, you don't. You put in a request to an agency, and

Information & Ethics committee  I think it has a culture of secrecy, but that's a function of being a public servant, whether the person is in the RCMP, the Canadian Armed Forces or another organization. They are asked to keep information confidential and share it only with those who have authorization. That's

Information & Ethics committee  Fundamentally, yes I do. In Canada, every department has its own access to information team. Those are the people who have the experience. They have a duty not just to apply the act, but also to help those requesting information. For example, they can suggest to requesters that

Information & Ethics committee  It's truly from a practical perspective. I'm in the business of law. We have deadlines that we are facing. We have to go to court and to make a plea. I use access on a regular basis in the pursuit of our files, whether they are for military or veterans or whatever. I depend on it

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know. I frankly don't know. The Information Commissioner may know. Up until the recent amendment to the act, one could not qualify any of the requests as vexatious. The federal court of appeal had long ago declared that the motive of the requester is immaterial. Regardl

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know. The Information Commissioner should be able to answer that.

Information & Ethics committee  Can you ask the question again?

Information & Ethics committee  This year and this year only, 52% of requests were submitted to that particular department.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't think so. I think, historically, for the past 30 years and more, the departments that received the highest numbers tended to be the same from one year to the next. CRA is one. The Department of National Defence is another. The RCMP is another. Those departments tend to ra

Information & Ethics committee  The first one is that last year, 52% of the access requests overall were directed to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. It was an explosion of requests that I had never seen before. There were 145,000 directed to that particular department. I think it would be fair to

Information & Ethics committee  It did, but not to the same extent. At the same time, the Information Commissioner received 10,000 complaints, as opposed to the 5,000 or 6,000 they would have in a normal year. You have a system that's bogged down at the federal institution level and the OIC. Last year was a d

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for having me. As a published author of an annotated legal text on access to information for the past 20 years, and as a frequent user under the access to information regime for the past 30 years, I've come across every frustration possible. However, I believe that tod