Information & Ethics committee  No.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I'll certainly find you that. Certainly I think the system should be more biased in that direction of open by default; however, as a former member of the intelligence community, I do recognize that there are legitimate reasons that some records do need protection. I think

Information & Ethics committee  I'll certainly try to do that. Having come from government and now working on the outside, I've ended up learning a lot more about the access to information process than I ever wanted to know. Most of my work has been on Canadian files. I have not done work in British or Ameri

Information & Ethics committee  A well-functioning access regime is absolutely essential to a functioning democracy.

Information & Ethics committee  Clearly each government has its own regulations, and certainly those kinds of political issues, as well as national defence issues, are potentially more sensitive. As I mentioned, all of our allies have instituted procedures for actually dealing with that and for allowing for the

Information & Ethics committee  If government departments transfer records to LAC as open records, then those records can be accessed by researchers. However, many government records, particularly in the areas I'm interested in, are transferred to LAC as restricted, so those all require access requests. There's

Information & Ethics committee  I can't comment specifically on that area of the document as it isn't one on which I've been working, but essentially the same principles apply. If they are being held in a classified form, right now there is no other mechanism besides going through the very cumbersome process of

Information & Ethics committee  There are various aspects of the current arrangements that make it very difficult to access historical records. A large part of that is that the government really doesn't know what it has already released. These records are in various different departments. In some cases, I've b

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, exactly. There are wide ranges of history that are still restricted. I broadly categorize those as intelligence, security, international affairs and defence. Essentially, it's any of those areas of history that are affected by section 15 of the Access to Information Act, wh

Information & Ethics committee  The American declassification system is really quite complicated and there are various categories, and I'm not as familiar with that system as I am with the British system. In the British system, there is a legislated requirement that government records be reviewed after 30 years

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity to address you on the important subject of access to information. I would like to raise a topic that has received little attention so far, which is the difficulty of accessing historic government records.