Information & Ethics committee  Yes, the Information Commissioner of Canada should be allowed to review decisions to withhold cabinet records, absolutely. It's not such a crazy idea. There's a professor at the University of Ottawa, Yan Campagnolo, who just wrote a book about this, and that was his recommendatio

Information & Ethics committee  The citizenship and immigration load on the access to information system is quite ridiculous. That department made a decision.... I don't know how long ago it was, at least 20 years. It was getting a lot of questions about clients' files, so it said, “We don't have the administra

Information & Ethics committee  Well, the system is overseen by Treasury Board. One of my invitations would go to the President of the Treasury Board, and perhaps to the equivalent of deputy minister there. They are the ones who make key decisions about how this system works, and they should be held accountabl

Information & Ethics committee  You were asking about the future of investigative journalism. The branch of investigative journalism that relies on documents is dying, because of the inadequacies of the Access to Information Act. It's not that other investigations can't happen. We rely on whistle-blowers. We r

Information & Ethics committee  It's not the 16th that I participated in, but the 16th that has been conducted.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not sure what you mean by the goal of the Access to Information Act.

Information & Ethics committee  The point of the act, from my point of view, is to empower ordinary citizens, to empower Canadians, to challenge their government, to hold their government to account, and to acquire information about themselves and issues that they're interested in. It shifts power from governme

Information & Ethics committee  No, it's not, because governments—not just this one, but through the 40 years of the act—have jealousy guarded their control of information. It's a natural process of wanting to avoid embarrassment or maybe to keep malfeasance covered up or whatever. Controlling information is

Information & Ethics committee  It's hard to say, because Treasury Board keeps such poor statistics. They do an annual report, but it's quite unreliable. They don't use scientific methods to gather their data, so it's a lot of guesswork. On that point, it's interesting that there are more requests than ever be

Information & Ethics committee  I would say those data brokers have every right to request information, just as all of us do. You're forgetting that these people are doing a service. They're selling a service to Canadians who find this information useful. The government isn't supplying it to them. The data brok

Information & Ethics committee  To be brief, I have had so many disappointments. For example, I asked for briefing notes for Prime Minister Harper and received them seven years later, after a new government and three elections. How am I supposed to hold the government to account when I become, essentially, a h

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question. All information is not created equal. A lot of information pushed out there has really little relevance to public affairs and public discourse. It's a bit of a game to say that more and more information is available. Is it useful information? Is it in

Information & Ethics committee  The short answer is yes. You can't have a functioning democracy without some kind of freedom of information system.

Information & Ethics committee  No, and it's in sharp decline, so it's getting worse every year.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for inviting me as a witness today. This inquiry, by my count, is at least the 16th broad review of the Access to Information Act since the legislation was passed in 1982. In this country, we love to study transparency laws thoroughly to ensure that we don’t actually g