Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the invitation and for the flexibility of doing it online.

Information & Ethics committee  I think it raises the question as to who decides what's in the public interest.

Information & Ethics committee  Ultimately, in our system of government, you have to rely on the courts. If matters are arbitrated, the Federal Court can decide whether withholding a redaction was unreasonable. The Federal Court can weigh the various interests, including national security, and so on. What's in

Information & Ethics committee  My whole argument is not to put aside the issue of funding, not to put aside the issue of training, not to put aside the issue of managing information in the digital age. How would we apply artificial intelligence and learning software to do document retrieval, and so on? It requ

Information & Ethics committee  I think that is possible. You saw the U.K. example of Suella Braverman and using unauthorized software and so on. You could hardwire into legislation a power by the chief information officer to sign off on the choice of software and devices used for government business. You cou

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know if the practice has changed, but I certainly remember the commissioner used to issue report cards giving people an A, B or F.

Information & Ethics committee  That certainly created feedback. You did not want to get an F. You wanted to get a gentleman's C, at least, or something like that. I think that is a role the commissioner can play—giving them that kind of evaluation and feedback. That would put pressure on agencies to perform b

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not sure they did, but they were collected and sent somewhere, along with a lot of other records.

Information & Ethics committee  Sure. Cabinet and its committees are a fairly easy-to-identify zone. There is cabinet and there are committees, which include Treasury Board, and you can know what the agendas, the papers and the deliberations of those cabinet processes are. Political staff in ministers' office

Information & Ethics committee  Well, I think there are different aspects of government. There are 300 departments and agencies. You can see them all on GC InfoBase, which I hope you've all bookmarked. It lists all of the federal entities, their budgets, their people, their activities and so on, and is an impor

Information & Ethics committee  I would suggest that you ask the archivist of Canada. What happens is that departments store things in filing cabinets and storage rooms. I remember looking at this during the Harper government's deficit reduction plan. Something like 15% to 20% of government real estate was use

Information & Ethics committee  No. That's not right.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm sorry, but I actually think that's a good answer to the question, which is that you should go to some of the international ranking scores. I could send the committee a list of them. In a ranking of the most transparent countries by U.S. News & World Report, Canada was s

Information & Ethics committee  It's ultimately up to Parliament to decide how much to appropriate. You have a range of officers, agents and feedback loops from the Information Commissioner, the Privacy Commissioner, the Auditor General, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the official languages commissioner, the

Information & Ethics committee  I don't have enough knowledge to recommend anything. I think that some sort of reasonable period for disclosure, especially if something is subject to proactive disclosure, should be accommodated, but I am not in a position to offer what that cut-off should be. The Federal Cour