OGGO Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Monday, March 24, 2003

Á

1110

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro (York West, Lib.))

Mr. John Reid (Information Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada)

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. John Reid

Á

1115

Á

1120

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. Ken Epp (Elk Island, Canadian Alliance)

Mr. John Reid

Á

1125

Mr. Ken Epp

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Ken Epp

Á

1130

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Ken Epp

Mr. John Reid

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ)

Á

1135

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Á

1140

Mr. John Reid

Á

1145

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. Tony Tirabassi (Niagara Centre, Lib.)

Mr. John Reid

Á

1150

Mr. Tony Tirabassi

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Tony Tirabassi

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Á

1155

Mr. John Reid

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. Ken Epp

Â

1200

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Ken Epp

Â

1205

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Ken Epp

Mr. John Reid

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. Ken Epp

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance)

Mr. John Reid

Â

1210

Mr. Paul Forseth

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Paul Forseth

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Â

1215

Mr. John Reid

Â

1220

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Mr. John Reid

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. Tony Tirabassi

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Tony Tirabassi

Mr. John Reid

Â

1225

Mr. Tony Tirabassi

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

Mr. Paul Forseth

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Paul Forseth

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Paul Forseth

Mr. John Reid

Mr. Paul Forseth

Mr. John Reid

The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro)

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CANADA

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

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NUMBER 022

l

2nd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

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EVIDENCE

Monday, March 24, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Á  (1110)  

[English]

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro (York West, Lib.)): I call the meeting to order.

    We have with us today John Reid, the Information Commissioner of Canada, and his assistant Daniel Brunet.

    We're very pleased to have you with us today. I think you know the information we're looking for. If you could be as direct with that as possible, we would appreciate it, in order that we have sufficient time for the many questions that I'm sure the committee will have.

    Welcome.

    Mr. John Reid (Information Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada): Thank you, Madam Chair.

    I've provided a text in both languages, and I wonder if it could be printed as an appendix to today's meeting. It would eliminate a certain amount of material here, and I could go directly to my major points.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): Yes, we all have copies of it, so that should be acceptable.

    Mr. John Reid: Fine.

    I'd like to start by thanking the committee for the opportunity to appear and to discuss what I think is one of the items that should come under intensive discussion by this committee. What I wish to refer to is the most significant threat to open and accountable government--namely, a crisis in information management in the government of Canada.

    One of the things that's seldom mentioned when we talk about this question is the impact of failure in these systems on decision-making, both low-level and high-level.

    I want to give you an anecdote, one that concerns Henry McDonald, a former director of the NASA Ames Research Center. He was the first witness in the formal hearings called to investigate the loss of the Columbia Shuttle.

    In its account of Mr. McDonald's testimony, the New York Times of March 7, 2003, said:

The leader of a recent study of space shuttle safety told the board investigating the loss of the Columbia today that NASA engineers could not reliably identify safety problems because the agency's record-keeping was so poor. [Mr. McDonald] said NASA engineers and managers, including Ron D. Dittemore, the program manager, were diligent in doing the right thing when they could identify what that was.

    The article then went on to present this excerpt from Mr. McDonald's evidence:

I have no concern at all that people like Ron Dittemore, presented with the facts, will make the right decision....The concern is presenting him with the facts. When somebody like Dittemore goes and tries to make an assessment of what his risk is, the instant access to all of that past history would have been valuable, incredibly valuable, I think.

Clearly, he did not have access to that material.

    What I am interested in is effective government, and it is clear to me that you cannot have effective government, and certainly not accountable government, if appropriate documentation is not created, or, if created, you cannot access it in a timely way. You cannot have intelligent debate both within and without the government if it's not based on the best information that you can provide.

    In Canada we saw a report in the National Post describing a paper prepared by the Governance Institute on the quality of information and advice provided to senior officials and the cabinet. I quote from the newspaper article:

....The Governance Network interviewed 33 senior public servants, including the current and former Clerk of the Privy Council and senior Treasury Board and Privy Council bureaucrats. The mandarins said the government is “weak” on big policy issues and that too many existing policies don't work. They also said Memoranda to Cabinet documents are no longer backed up by solid research and blamed this on a lack of demand from Cabinet ministers.

    My concern is this: when records documenting the actions, decisions, and considerations of public officials are not created; when such records as are created are not included in an indexed, institutional system of records; or when the disposition or archiving of records is left to the unguided whim of the records creator, then there cannot be intelligent judgments and decisions based on quality information. As well, there cannot be the accountability required in a healthy democracy.

    Now, I belive all of our mechanisms of accountability, including our right to access to information, are suffocating from the lack of information oxygen. The Auditor General keeps warning Canadians and parliamentarians, in ever more urgent tones with each passing year, that the audit function cannot be carried on with confidence in the absence of a paper trail.

    Parliamentarians and parliamentary committees are expressing consternation about the unavailability of government records to assist them in their deliberations. Journalists are becoming less able to obtain source records and data and are more reliant on the carefully managed information releases from government communications spokespersons.

    Those who have been following the recent public statements by the Auditor General will know that these concerns are not confined to those of us who work in the field of access to information, nor are they theoretical.

Á  (1115)  

    In her report to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services, Auditor General Sheila Fraser noted that some contract files with respect to sponsorship were so poorly documented that key audit questions concerning value for money and lawfulness could not be answered. Public servants are again being reminded that any effort to avoid accountability by failing to create and keep appropriate records can backfire. It can land you on the wrong end of an RCMP investigation.

    Yet, often from the most senior levels of government, officials are told to avoid creating records. It's rare in government for committees to keep agendas, minutes, or records of decision. And when such records are kept, it is often in the form of informal, handwritten notes of participants, which notes are never entered into any departmental system of records, and hence are rarely identified in response to a request from an auditor general or an access requester.

    As we all know, to the chagrin of future historians, such notes are treated as transitory records for disposal purposes. Public officials destroy them or take them home upon retirement to languish in boxes in basements and garages. We know because we have found records in those places--much more important records, sometimes, than the handwritten notes.

    Oral briefings and e-mail exchanges are encouraged, again to avoid the creation of permanent records. Public servants now understand, courtesy of Colleen Beaumier's successful private member's bill, that it's an offence to destroy, to hide, to alter, or to falsify a record in order to avoid subsequent disclosure. They know that there's a risk of imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years and a $10,000 fine.

    Records destruction or falsification is not a smart technique for avoiding accountability. Consequently, the option of not creating records in the first place is the preferred option for many officials.

    As a result, because a fundamentally important democratic right is at stake as well as the whole concept of effective, efficient government, I've come to the view that some basic rules of effective information management must be legislated. As well, there are other profoundly important reasons for taking the step of legislating good record-keeping rules, principal among them being better-quality decisions and program delivery in government and the preservation of an acceptably complete historical record.

    The most fundamentally important obligatory rule would be this: public servants shall create records that document their actions, decisions, and considerations.

    If creation is the primary rule, maintenance is the second. All records must find their way into an accessible and usable institutional system of records. Now the diskettes and hard drives of individual officers constitute the departmental records room. Record holdings are vastly decentralized, unindexed, and hence inaccessible and undisclosable, and, by the way, unavailable to inform future decision-makers, oversight bodies, parliamentarians, or members of the public exercising their right of access.

    These rules, enshrined in law, coupled with penalties for their contravention, would do what policy can't seem to do--provide a real incentive to match resources with rhetoric.

    To take us to the next level of advancement in information management reform, I believe we must engage the force of law. The time is now, in our view, for an information management act--that is, legislated and enforced information management rules designed to regulate the entire life cycle of government-held information. The law would also identify the responsibility centre for monitoring and enforcing the law.

    There are six principles that I believe should be included in that law. These are:

1. Availability: Information must be created, acquired, and maintained so as to document important activities and decision-making process adequately.

2. Accessibility: Information should be accessible to and shared with those who need to access it and have a right to do so.

3. Stewardship: Departments should be accountable for ensuring the accuracy, authenticity, relevance, and reliability of their information resources.

4. Creation, retention, and retrieval: Government information should be created, acquired, and retained only for valid business, legal, policy, accountability, and archival needs.

5. Privacy and security: The security of information should be protected to ensure privacy, confidentiality, and information integrity, consistent with business, legal, and policy requirements.

Á  (1120)  

6. Life-cycle management: Information in all media and forms should be managed as a strategic resource throughout its life cycle, from creation or collection through storage, use, destruction, or archival preservation.

    My plea is for this committee to play a pivotal role in encouraging the government to make information management reform its most important infrastructure project. What a superb contribution that would be to facilitating good, accountable government in Canada for the 21st century.

    In conclusion, Madam Chairman, I think we have to understand that the system is broken. Repairing it will not be easy, but the effort has to begin as soon as possible.

    Thank you.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): Thank you very much, Mr. Reid, and thank you for condensing your presentation to allow us additional time.

    Mr. Epp, are you prepared to go first?

    Mr. Ken Epp (Elk Island, Canadian Alliance): I am, as always.

    Thank you very much, Mr. Reid, for showing up at our committee today.

    I notice that the last paragraph in your written statement is rather presumptive. I suppose, if no one had shown up at all here, then the phrase, as you say here, “You've been very kind with your attention”, would have been totally true. None of us broke in at all during your presentation. There were no heckles or anything.

    I have a question. We're aware on this committee that there is a tension between your office and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. I think it's a healthy tension. I think we need that. But you've even drawn on that fact in your recommendations on privacy and security. You mention accessibility, and that this information should be available, it should be sorted, it should be accessible in the sense that it's catalogued so you can find what you're looking for.

    Those are wonderful ideals, and yet in recommendation 5 you say this:

The security of information should be protected to ensure privacy, confidentiality and information integrity, consistent with business, legal and policy requirements;

    Again, we have a tension, I guess, a balance to be reached, and I'd like you to comment a little further on that with respect to government and particularly cabinet decisions, which is what we equate with government. When we use the word “government”, that's cabinet.

    All of that information seems to us to be held in private. Even the most elementary information is not available to us as parliamentarians and as Canadians. I'd like your comment on that, because I think you're coming from the point of more openness. How do you balance off the need for privacy and security of confidential information?

    Mr. John Reid: A recent decision by the Supreme Court said the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act amount to a seamless whole. The Privacy Commissioner has responsibility for part of that seamless whole and I have responsibility for the other half.

    But you should understand that about one-third to 40% of my business is with the Privacy Act. When we do investigations, we have to deal with the privacy equation as well. So I deal all the time with making value judgments or balance judgments in terms of the relationship between privacy and access.

    What I'm concerned about in the privacy equation that you quoted is two kinds of privacy. There is personal privacy of individuals, which is paramount, but there is also the privacy that is due to the government in terms of the restrictions on access to information, included in the Access to Information Act.

    For example, there are 13 headings under which information may be denied to a requester. So I want to see, in any kind of regime created, that the requirements of both the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act are fully respected.

    That said, I think there's also room for an examination of information that is kept private. We had a classic example of that when my deputy appeared before this committee, where we had to find out from Privy Council and Treasury Board what we could tell the committee, because half of the Treasury Board decision of our extra spending was considered to be a cabinet confidence.

    Now, eventually they said to us, well, you can't show them the document, but you can tell them what the spending is. I think it's wrong that members of Parliament investigating supplementary estimates can't see the Treasury Board decisions. That's the kind of privacy I'd like to see done away with. There's privacy on security questions that I think committees should look at, but I will always believe there will be a need for privacy in those issues.

Á  (1125)  

    Mr. Ken Epp: I think we all agree, especially in light of our world situation today, that certain information that the government engages in is indeed not to be made public. It would be a breach of our security. It would put our armed forces and our police at risk and so on. I don't think there's an argument there.

    But I have a continued interest in the criteria, even there, about what can be kept private. I know early on in my career I went through a very unhappy investigation, actually, in which a cabinet minister had taken private information and put it on a government credit card. Now, by my view, when an individual does that, as soon as they use a taxpayer-funded credit card, they have moved that information into the public domain. It should no longer be entitled to be held private.

    That was my contention then, and still is, and I don't think it has changed. In fact, it's been made worse. We have almost now no access at all to the spending of cabinet ministers and how they allocate their funds, especially their discretionary funds. It's all considered private and inaccessible to us. And if we do get it, there are two reactions. One is delay, delay, delay. The other is that if they're finally forced to give it, give them enough boxes so that they'll never find it.

    So I think those rules should be dramatically changed, and I guess I just put that on the record.

    I have another question for you with respect to your report, the part that you didn't read on page 3:

Also among the mechanisms or state accountability are individual rights such as freedom of speech and assembly, protections against unreasonable invasions of privacy and the right to a fair trial before being deprived of liberty or property.

    Now, that's a new innovation in Canada, since our Constitution does not provide for the ownership and enjoyment of private property. It's assumed by some and denied by others, depending on how they interpret it.

    Are you suggesting in this that we should actually have a specific reference, say, in our Constitution to liberty of ownership and enjoyment of property?

    Mr. John Reid: That has been a question of debate. I recall being in the House when those questions were debated. The decision was taken not to put it in because these were under the provincial headings of property and civil rights, so it was not proceeded with. The provinces were not prepared to accept federal constitutional invasion of their jurisdiction.

    What I was saying here was that these are the general liberties that we enjoy today. What I was trying to do was elucidate the kinds of accountability mechanisms one has with respect to the government and with respect to our own individual rights. I was taking it as a given that those provisions are real and that we all have access to them.

    I am aware that in the debate over Bill C-34 there were changes made to one's rights if one was charged under certain sections of that act, that you lost certain rights to appeal to the court to protect your freedoms.

    Mr. Ken Epp: Personally, it's my view that in our country we are not liberal enough in that regard.

    I want to talk a little bit about electronic information. In my previous life I actually taught computing. I was around when computers were invented, and sort of grew with them until I got sidetracked into this profession. Now I'm somewhat behind. The number of computer files that are created in government every day is probably approaching a billion, I would think. Each member of Parliament has a 40-gigabyte hard drive, and I imagine all of the other departments and department officials and many other staffers in the whole area of government have all of these files.

    Now, if you had a rule about maintaining those files, it wouldn't take long before the world wouldn't be big enough to contain all the computer disk drives that contain these files. So you have to have a mechanism to wipe those files out.

    Now, when that's done.... For example, in my office, with my computer, I make those judgments myself. When I see a file I'm probably never going to use again, click, it's gone.

    Well, not really gone; as you know, computer files are--

Á  (1130)  

    Mr. John Reid: They linger.

    Mr. Ken Epp: Yes. They're not erased when you click the delete file. They're still there, just out of the directory.

    At any rate, we make these decisions individually. How do you propose that we could ever regulate this so that things that are important to our archives...and for information for other people who need to know, information that another person in the government is doing? How can you ever take away from those individuals the right to make the decision on which files to keep without, at the same time, engaging in a massive intrusion of privacy?

    Mr. John Reid: Within the Government of Canada, of course, the files are not personal. They are, of course, the property of the government, so it's the government that has to make the determination as to what is important or not important. There is a rule of thumb that gets rid of an awful lot of stuff, which is that if it's a transitory document, then that document can be eliminated fairly quickly.

    Now, there is, within the National Archives of Canada Act, a provision as to what information is to be kept and how it's to be treated. So that basic rule of thumb is clear and precise, and it works. The problem is, the national archivist doesn't have any money to go around and advise departments and to provide a proper educational system as to what should be kept and what should not be kept. But the rule is very clear, and where it is applied, nobody has any problem with it, including the Information Commissioner. So we do have the rule in place.

    The real problem we have is that there's no training in the system as to what documents you should keep and what documents you should eliminate. I agree with you, that you don't want to keep everything. That would be foolish. If you take a look at what happens when, say, an office sends documents to the national archivist, they go through it and they keep maybe 5% to 8% of the total amount.

    So it's not rocket science to understand that we really want to drill down to the material that is important, but the people who have to make that decision cannot necessarily be the people who created it, because they may not understand the importance of their work. It has to be somebody from outside who can look at and assess and make that decision.

    My judgment is that there is work now going on within the Government of Canada to see what else can be done, but right now there is a very good piece of legislation in the National Archives of Canada Act, which provides the rules and regulations on how to go about eliminating that kind of surplus information.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): Mr. Lanctôt.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ): Thank you, Madam Chair.

    I would like to deal with one issue before addressing information management, which, I realize, was the main subject of your presentation today. The issue I would like to raise is extremely important for members of Parliament and probably also for reporters and for any Canadian requesting information. The issue is information contained in contracts signed between the government and the private sector. I would like your opinion on that matter. I am aware that members of the Bloc Québécois, and Quebeckers in general, always want to make sure that information and privacy are protected; that is very important.

    However, there are some egregious anomalies. If you put in a request under the Access to Information Act, you always get the same answer, which is that there are exceptions and that you cannot get the information, nor see the contracts or the invoices, because it is protected information and disclosing it may negatively affect the financial situation of the business in question and so on.

    When you deal with the government, you can expect your dealings to be made public. But we have reached the point where, if you file 10 access to information requests, you're lucky if you get one reply. It seems that every case is an exception. Some things are said in the House of Commons. We ask questions of ministers and receive mind-boggling answers that are sometimes—I won't say the word—not a reflection of the truth. We have evidence, but we need additional evidence. This additional evidence is often contained in documents which bring together the private and public sectors, and the only issue is not always how information is managed by public servants, by the book. Therefore, the law must be changed.

    I don't know what you think of this situation, but we need information to do our job and my guess is that reporters need it as well. People who want public information should get it, because these contracts are concluded with the government. I'm tired of hearing that it is a private matter and may affect the business involved. If a company wants to do business with the government, it should play by the rules and make information available. I would like to know what you think of this matter.

Á  (1135)  

[English]

    Mr. John Reid: This is a very interesting question, Madam Chair, and it's one we deal with on a regular basis. There are always appeals from decisions made about contract information.

    What happens is that any contract between the government and a private individual, or a government and a corporation, is in effect a public document. It is accessible under the Access to Information Act.

    Second, the company that is bidding for a government contract may say that certain information in there is proprietary to them and therefore is protected under the Access to Information Act. And this is often true. Sometimes it's not true.

    Third, you are entitled to have the total value of the contract, but not necessarily the way in which the contract is broken down into its segments, because that can give commercial information away.

    Generally speaking, though, when you request a contract, you should be able to get the contract document. You should be able to see who signed it from both the government and from the point of view of the private sector. You should be able to get the terms and conditions. You should only have those narrow exceptions in the contract.

    Generally speaking, we find the discrepancies are whether or not the information that the third party--that is, the contractor--wants to hold back is truly significant commercial information that would affect them in a negative way if it got out.

    We had a contract of that nature the other day. In going through it, we determined that the confidential information the company was claiming was not confidential information. So our recommendation was that the material go out. But if there is confidential information that is proprietary to the company, and the company has protected as proprietary information, then the judgment will always be to protect it. We have found cases in contracts where the proprietary information was sitting on the website of the company itself, in which case we have recommended it come out. So we try to do an investigation into this, into these questions, as carefully as possible.

    Privacy is not really an issue when it comes to contracts, because the contract is signed between a public body, and it becomes a public document. It should be accessible to you, with the exceptions I have noted.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: Exactly. I'm glad to hear you think that way. I would like to explore the issue a bit further by asking you what you think about the exemptions contained in section 16 of the bill. If you look at the exemptions, you realize that a lot of information should be made public, but is not.

    There should perhaps be an exception for these exceptions, which would become the rule, if we are to do our job. We are parliamentarians twenty-four hours a day, because we are accountable and responsible. I think our ministers say those two words about 50 times a day. But our legislation is increasingly undemocratic, such as the bill on terrorism and Bill C-17. Many of our laws make our privacy rights vulnerable, but new privacy legislation should also apply to ministers with secret information, such as the Minister of National Defence. By the way, these laws are supposed to help us fight against terrorism, but they have significantly breached the democratic principles of our country and the rights of all of its citizens.

    Why should there not be an exemption to the exemption for a member of Parliament who asks specific questions of a minister in the House of Commons? I understand that we want to protect the privacy or confidential information of a private business, but if, as you say, each time we do not get the information, which is about 9 times out of 10, the member of Parliament has to file a complaint and appear before the tribunal to hear the reasons why confidentiality must be maintained or not, we will never be able to do our job.

    That is what is happening right now. We are dealing with some very hot issues and information which should not be confidential. For issues raised in the House of Commons, we should be exempted from the exemptions contained in section 16 if we find discrepancies or have received "erroneous" answers. Businesses should make that information available. Disclosure should come before privacy protection for business dealings or other reasons. Do you think that members of Parliament should be exempted from these exemptions?

Á  (1140)  

[English]

    Mr. John Reid: I think the important thing to recognize about the Access to Information Act is that it has set the security system of government documents. Whenever a document is rated by the government on whether or not it can be released, or the information contained in it can be released, they always have to go back to the Access to Information Act. So this is our basic security document.

    Before the Access to Information Act, we had systems that would say documents were “confidential”, “top secret”, or “for your eyes only”. When the Access to Information Act came out, it meant that all of that became quantified and qualified, and provided an examination of the facts outside government through the Office of the Information Commissioner. So this is our basic system of rating documentation.

    Now, if you say that members of Parliament ought to have a way of overriding the act by asking questions in the House of Commons, then of course the act doesn't mean anything, because that's a very public place. I am aware that government has made available information to closed committees, behind closed doors, from time to time, and I'm aware that government occasionally makes information available outside the system as well. For example, information that would normally qualify as a cabinet confidence is often made public.

    So the question really is, can you override the act? The answer is, no, you can't override the act, but what you can do is examine the act to see whether or not the criteria developed in the seventies hold up in the new century.

    What happened was that these criteria were put together in the 1970s, and the act was passed in 1982. It went into effect in 1983. The government has appointed a task force, which has reported on the adequacy of the existing legislation. I would advise you that the task force would put many more restrictions on information flowing out than is the case now. In my judgment, it's an “anti” access to information set of proposals.

    I would hope that at some point this committee or some other committee would undertake the very difficult job of examining this act and looking at it from the point of view of whether or not these restrictions make any sense now. As you know, once Parliament passes a law it becomes interpreted by the courts and that becomes the way in which the information flows under the act. I can't change that. The Information Commissioner is a creation of the act, and he is bound to obey the strictures that are in the act. The government as well has the responsibility of obeying the act.

    In some cases there are exceptions. There is what we call the “public interest override”, where the government can determine that it's in the public interest for this information to come out. There are other aspects of the act where the government has no choice. For example, on the privacy side, it cannot release the information. There are other cases in which the government must be able to demonstrate that if this information comes out it will hurt the government, or hurt the institution involved.

    Those are the three criteria on how information comes out, and I think they should be examined. I have called for an examination, because after 20 years the legislation is slightly old in the tooth. We've already had an investigation by the civil service itself, the report I referred to before, and there should be one done by members of Parliament.

Á  (1145)  

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): Thank you very much, Mr. Lanctôt.

    Mr. Tirabassi.

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi (Niagara Centre, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair, and I'd like to thank our witnesses appearing here today.

    Mr. Epp asked a couple of questions of particular interest to me, regarding the relationship between you and the Privacy Commissioner, which you adequately answered, as well as electronic record-keeping and how that's all impacted. So I'm going to move on to public versus private.

    Do you investigate or do comparators with the private sector--for instance, if a large multinational corporation goes down, and there are subsequent investigations--on how their information is made available, how their record-keeping is maintained, their whole management of information? Do you do those comparators?

    Mr. John Reid: No, we do not. We watch, but we have no ability to do anything in depth. We spend a fair amount of time, or at least I spend a lot of my time, watching the whole documentation management process. I can say that it's not good anywhere. It's a very difficult problem for everybody. Everybody is feeling the same kind of pressures, and everybody is feeling the same kind of lack of access to their information. And it becomes very difficult for anybody to make intelligent decisions if you can't access your data as rapidly as you want.

    Now, for private sector companies, generally speaking, they have a much more narrow focus. Therefore, the ability to understand what your database is, and how important it is, is much more easily directed. The dilemma with government, because it operates on such a broad level, at any level, is the difficulty of being able to ascertain what is important and how it can be kept.

    There's another aspect to this, and that is the question of...even in complex organizations. I gave you the quotations from the NASA hearings. That's an example of how, even though you may well be on the forefront of technological innovation, your information management may not be there, and it impacts directly on the quality of the decisions you make.

    We now have ample proof that within the Government of Canada we have a real crisis of information, because the government can't access the information it wants and needs for its own decision-making process in a timely way, at both the political and bureaucratic level.

    So I always hesitate to say that the Government of Canada is worse than anybody else. I think it has a crisis. I can't compare it to any other government, and I can't compare it to the private sector either, but I know that everybody is going through the process of wrestling with this whole question of information and information management.

    I might say that the decision by the government to try to make Canada one of the most wired countries in the world by 2004, now extended to 2005, was a very bold stroke in attempting to come to grips with the electronic world, both from the point of view of cyberspace and from the point of view of electronic documentation and the management in electronic documentation. Because if you wish to be the most wired government in the world, you have to have an awful lot of your documentation in electronic form, and you have to know where it is if you're going to be able to respond. So I think this is a very worthwhile initiative.

    And I did mention before, in answer to a question by Mr. Epp, that there are studies going on within Treasury Board. It perhaps would be worthwhile at some point for the committee to inquire about them and to find out what they are all about, and what's going on. As well, I might say there are a couple of interesting websites, on Treasury Board's overall site, dealing with information management.

Á  (1150)  

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi: I'm just curious about the type of inquiries you might get. Where is this on the general public's radar screen? What is the nature of the inquiries? Are they from individuals, groups, corporations? Do they make inquiries about maybe what took place here at the committee meeting today, or what happened during Question Period? Could you give me an overall view of just what types of inquiries come into your office?

    Mr. John Reid: About 40% of the requests for information that come in to government come from the business community. Members of Parliament make up about 3% to 5%, journalists about the same, academics about 1%, and the general population makes up the rest.

    The material that comes to me for investigation comes from people who have received documents and say, “There's information I want that I have been denied.” Consequently, I see only about 10% of what comes in, and it's a self-selected 10%.

    As an individual, you may ask for documents of something that is of interest to you, and you may get documents that are badly marked up, and a lot of material taken out, but you may find what you're looking for, so you're not going to complain. A journalist may get the same kind of documents, or a member of Parliament may get the same kind of documents, and they'll say, “I'm being denied something, and I'm going to appeal.” So it's a self-selection process.

    When we get a complaint we begin the process by informing everybody that we have it. It's assigned to one of our investigators, and when we go out the first thing we do is look at the complete file--that is to say, everything the department has acquired when it has looked for the information that has been requested. So we see the original documents, and then we see the documents that have been treated...and with the exceptions.

    Then we go through, and we go to the department, and say, okay, why did you take this out, and what is your justification for it? What part of the act is it? Did you look at whether or not there was an exception? Did you look at whether or not there was an injury test? Did you look at whether or not the public interest was great enough to allow this to take place?

    At the end of the investigation, which is now averaging about six to seven months, the Information Commissioner will make a judgment and make a finding, which he will then report to the person who complained, and to the department involved. So that's our process.

    As I mentioned to Monsieur Lanctôt, we get a number of complaints every year in terms of government contracts. We know the questions that have to be asked, and we go after them.

    Actually, contracts are relatively easy to do, because there are not tons and tons of documents that we have to go through.

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi: Very good.

    That's it.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): If it's okay with the committee, I would just like to slip in a fast question.

    Mr. Reid, you mentioned earlier the fact that often the instructions to senior-level bureaucrats are to not keep minutes of various meetings. How big a problem is that, and how would we fix that problem? I mean, the minutes lay out exactly what went on to lead to the eventuality of a decision, at some point. How do you manage to ensure that the minutes are kept, but yet you don't end up being overloaded with so much paper, as we see here already, throughout the system?

Á  (1155)  

    Mr. John Reid: The interesting thing is, before the Access to Information Act came through, minutes were routinely kept. After the access act came through, minutes stopped being kept. In many cases, the justification, when we asked for it, was that it was a financial reason; they could save a secretary and a couple of other people and so on.

    But consider this. We've had cases where somebody has asked for documents, and in our investigation we find out that it was maybe discussed at the morning meeting that every department has. We say, “Could we see your minutes?” There are no minutes. “Could we see your agenda?” There is no agenda. “Could we see your black books, then?” Well, the government doesn't want us to see the black books, but they now become the only record of what goes on.

    So we have cases where senior people will come in, and when we ask them what went on in the meeting, they'll say, “I can't remember, that was six months ago.” Well, how do you run a complex organization, such as a major department, when you have meetings every morning and there are no minutes kept? How do you know what you've decided? How can you have accountability? If you've made a decision, how can you follow through to make sure that decision is actually carried out the way in which the meeting decided?

    So I approach this not from the point of access to information, necessarily; I approach it from the point of view of efficient, competent government. And what I see happening, in a whole series of areas, is that the necessary records are not there.

    You go into a department and say to them, “Why do you have this process in place?” We got an order six months ago that we were to do it this way. “Could we see the order?” It was verbal. It was given to me by phone. “Who gave it to you?” The official. So you go up to the official, who says, “I don't recall, but I guess if he said so, I did it.”

    How can you run an efficient government like that?

    So the question becomes, if the culture of the public service is such that appropriate record-keeping is not something you do automatically, then it seems to me you have to provide, in law, the requirement that minutes be kept.

    I confess to you, I have come to this very reluctantly, because I don't think we need to pile on law after law. But when I see the collapse of a culture of record-keeping and the collapse of a culture of accountability, then it seems to me we have to find another way of doing it.

    I have suggested that we do it by way of law. There may be other ways, and I am prepared to debate that.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): Thank you very much, Mr. Reid.

    Mr. Epp, second round of questioning.

    Mr. Ken Epp: Thank you.

    Of course, you know the outcome of that. If you pass a law that says all meetings must have an agenda, and must have minutes that are recorded, then they will just stop having meetings. They will meet informally at the water cooler, and just accidentally happen to have asked somebody a question,

    I think, Mr. Reid, the reason this is happening is a very simple psychological defence mechanism: generally we tend to avoid punishment. It's very seldom that people ask for information from a government official--or from a member of Parliament, even, through access to information--because they want to praise the member. Usually it's because they want to rip into him for having done something wrong or stupid. It's used for political purposes and it's also used for accountability.

    I'm a member of the opposition, and I think part of my legitimate role is to keep the government people on their toes. And part of their fear should be that it could be found out.

    So in terms of your little phrase in here, that one of the outcomes is that you get better decision-making, if you know it's going to be found out, or there's a reasonable chance it will be found out, then you're not going to do it.

    As a matter of fact, I did that with my own staff when I was first elected. I said to them, everything that you write, assume it's going to be on the front page of our local papers, so think about what you're writing, no matter what the context. I think it's an automatic thing.

    So to legislate that all of these records will be kept, I think you're then going to find either ways of avoiding that, or maybe even, I don't know, falsification of the record, or omission of certain things that are deemed to be perhaps a future problem.

    I don't think there is a solution to it.

    Your reaction.

  (1200)  

    Mr. John Reid: I had to work through those exact same concerns. In the end, I came to the conclusion that something has to be done, because the current situation is not good for anybody. At least if you have some requirement that minutes be kept, that documents be created where they have to be created, it means that there's an obligation on people to do that. My expectation is that people will follow that kind of obligation. But the culture in the civil service today is such that documents are not created where they're required.

    What bothers me is that documents aren't created where they're required so that you can actually effectively govern large, complex organizations. I think it's rather amusing that the only two places where adequate minutes are kept are those of cabinet and those of parliamentary committees and Parliament itself.

    Mr. Ken Epp: Yes. Every word we say here, including this one, is recorded for posterity. I'd better be careful what I say.

    I had another question related to your presentation...and I've forgotten what it was, because you threw me off here.

    Oh, yes, going back to the general tone of your presentation, accountability grows out of information-keeping and accessibility to that. You quote the Auditor General as saying, “Information is the current that charges accountability in government”. So there's this accountability in the right of access of information.

    Now, I want to ask you a question, and I want this on the public record. The Grey Cup this year was held in Edmonton. I fly back and forth to Edmonton every week. And I observed that there were more than the usual number of visiting members of Parliament that weekend. So I tried to find out how many airplane seats and how many hotel bills had been paid for by the government, in Edmonton, between these two dates. I asked specifically for the House of Commons. It wasn't a big request. I wanted to know how many, who they were, when they arrived, and when they left. I just gave the timeframe from, I think, the Monday before the Grey Cup until the Wednesday following, just to see what the travel costs were.

    I was denied. I was told that I couldn't have that information, that it was secret.

    I can't imagine that being, say, a world security issue. I can't imagine it being anything other than, we just don't want the taxpayers to know that they paid for a number of MPs and their families to go to the Grey Cup. I really think that's what it is.

    I can't get it, so therefore I haven't been able to do anything with it. I still can't. Even saying this on the public record here is innuendo, as anybody would say. I mean, I recognize just about all the members of Parliament. I've been here with them for 10 years.

    Would you agree that this type of information should be readily accessible so that on the Web, say, any citizen of the country could click on Ken Epp and see the list of all his travel? Would that be unreasonable?

  (1205)  

    Mr. John Reid: You first have to understand that the House of Commons is outside the Access to Information Act--

    Mr. Ken Epp: I know that.

    Mr. John Reid: --so it's not covered. Members of Parliament have the ability to create any kind of information system that they wish to have for themselves. So that would be a question that you would have to debate amongst the members of Parliament, on whether you wanted that to happen or not. I don't know what committee would be the one to do that, but that would be where it is.

    Now, I understand there are some members who, on their own personal websites, do produce that kind of information, and that's a choice they make. But we have looked at the question of expense accounts, and we have determined that when government money is expended, that money should be accounted for. Consequently, we have always taken the position that the spending of those people within the government structure is available on request.

    That did apply to the ministers of the Crown until a decision came out from Treasury Board exempting them from that responsibility. A number of court cases that deal with this question are going through the system at the present time, so I will not go any further than to say that.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): Mr. Epp, you've had seven and a half minutes on the second round.

    Mr. Ken Epp: Oh, I'm sorry. Time flies when you're having fun, Madam Chair.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): I know that.

    Mr. Forseth.

    Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, and sorry for coming in late.

    I think the public has a greater desire to know than central authorities are giving. We're getting toward the computer age, and access to personal computers in Canada per population, I take it, is greater than in most nations around the world. Government is going to have to respond to that community expectation.

    I've seen that change myself, even in disseminating information directly with the public during elections. I was elected in 1993, and I understood the very limited role of websites and e-mail in 1993. I saw quite a change in 1997. In the year 2000, a candidate without a full-blown website and so on wasn't even in the game. So there has been a tremendous change there, and similarly with government departments.

    What is it, “form follows function”? We have the technical capacity to deliver, and then eventually the regulatory climate and the ethics and everything catch up around it. Perhaps you can comment on that philosophy of “form follows function”.

    The technical horizon is forever way ahead of us. You talked about Parliament, but how are we doing in government itself? They've made a lot of pronouncements, and we're putting a lot of money into that side of it, but I'm really wondering whether we are, in your general assessment, keeping up, and really doing what we need to do in that regard, especially in view of the conferences coming up in Ottawa about that whole topic of government per se, and its population. It does all this activity in their name, and yet I question whether sometimes technology is really serving...because you can use technology to hide as well. With the invention of all these call centres, and push button this, push button that, you can never talk to anybody any more. Then there are the computer-generated form letters and so on.

    So perhaps you would comment on that, the general ability of the rhetoric to be matched up to the real policy climate as compared to where the technology is going.

    Mr. John Reid: I think the initiative that the government has started, to be the most wired country in the world, has been very good. I think it's moving along. It has certainly had its bumps, but the initiative is worthwhile. A lot of work has gone into it, and it's very good. On the other hand, the information you need, documentation management, that has not really been addressed in any particular coherent way by senior officials. There are working groups within Treasury Board that have been trying to do something, but we have yet to see anything come out in terms of policy.

    So I think the front end is going along quite well. I think the back end needs a lot of work and a lot of drive.

    The only other comment I think I could make is that I'm concerned about the back end, because that's where the information is. And information is what I'm most familiar with, because that's what we deal with when people want it. I became interested in document management issues because we couldn't find the material that everybody admitted, in the department, should be there. I became interested in this because of the inability of government to produce the documentation that was requested.

    I became further interested when I found that we were ordering additional searches and finding much more information that was germane to the actual request. Then we spent about a year working on the documentation management, and that's when I got to the point of declaring a crisis within the government in terms of its management of its information holdings.

    So I would say that they're doing well in terms of the front end and not so well in terms of the back end in information management.

  (1210)  

    Mr. Paul Forseth: We have this general rubric to say, “I don't know what I don't know”, and that really is being in the dark. But when the door begins to be opened, and someone begins to find out what they don't know, that's the first realization. That might become the anger or the slow burn: “Okay, I'm beginning to understand all of the stuff I don't know. I'm hearing about it, or seeing directories, but I can't get that material.” There's a discordance there.

    We've had evidence in front of this committee that, oh, we have some 180,000 documents, and they're going to be available online; we're doing great as compared to other countries.

    Is that really the case? How are we doing?

    Mr. John Reid: I think on the online side we're doing very well. I think the Canadian government has done very well.

    However, on the documentation management side, it's not doing so well. So if you look at it from the point of view of the front end--what the public can see--and if you look at it from the point of view of what you need to make decisions, there's really, in my judgment, quite a gap.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: Okay. I'll leave it at that.

    Thank you.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): Mr. Lanctôt.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: When one files a request under the Access to Information Act, I would like to know why one only sometimes get the documents one is looking for. It may just be a general request, but sometimes you only get half the documents you wanted. When we make a request, you transmit the request to the department on our behalf, and when we receive the documents, weeks or sometimes months later, we have the impression that information has been withheld.

    When this happens, is there some kind of an automatic mechanism which triggers an investigation on your part into the information we asked for, or do you simply take the documents and send them on to us?

    It seems very strange. When we make a request, we are supposed to receive the entire file. But why do we sometimes get part of the information first and the rest later, with the time lag between the two sometimes fairly short, but other times much longer?

    Second, we are in the process of studying changes in the work culture of public servants. This committee is studying Bill C-25, and I was wondering what you thought about the fact that the legislation contains no provision to protect whistle-blowers? As you said yourself in your presentation, fewer and fewer things are being written down to avoid presenting false information. Nothing is written down any more.

    As Mr. Epp said, it's clear that those people are put in a difficult situation when information is requested. They are afraid to disclose the information, they are afraid of providing the documents and they are even more afraid of testifying before a committee. What do you think of this?

  (1215)  

[English]

    Mr. John Reid: Let me deal with the last question first.

    The government has appointed an ombudsman, Mr. Keyserlingk, who is responsible for the protection of whistle-blowers. So there is an office within the Government of Canada where, if you find something that is of importance and that you feel is being covered up, you can go. And that office has been implemented, I believe, for about six to eight months, within that period of time. So the government has moved to try to provide that kind of protection.

    On the question of documentation, often when we get a complaint we will go in and look at the documents produced by the department in response to the original request. Sometimes when we look at those we will say, “You did not do an adequate search. Do another search.” Inevitably, when that is done we find a whole series of significant other documents.

    Is the fact that the documents are not all there at the first search a result of trying to hide? Generally speaking, our experience has been that they simply don't know where the documents are. And generally speaking, the second search will cover not only the areas where the search was done the first time but a broader range within the department. That's why we have that power to order the second search, and we use it.

    Secondly, very often what will happen is that we will go through the documents, we will make suggestions to the department that some material should be made available that wasn't available before, but we'll say that there's still some other material that we have to deal with that's more difficult, so send the new material off to the person who requested it. We operate on the basis that information has a time value, and the sooner you can get the material, the better. We have been promoting within the departments that when they are going through the documents, if they get 60% of them done, it's better to send that 60% off to the person who has asked for it than to wait for the other 40%, which may be more tricky for them to deal with.

    So what we want to do is make sure the information flows to you as rapidly as it can so that you get the information--perhaps in three or four parcels--as it becomes available. If we didn't take that approach, then it might happen that instead of getting maybe 60% of it within a month, you may have to wait three months before you got 100% of it. So our approach has been to try to get as much material out to you as is possible.

    The last thing I want to say in answer to that question is that when we go in and we order the second search--and it's not been unusual for us to order a third search as well--we find that because of the way in which departments have been shuffled over the last ten years as a result of cutbacks, as a result of consolidation of departments, a lot of records have ended up in strange storage rooms. Sometimes they are found by accident and sometimes by design. But one of the casualties of downsizing has been records management. A lot of records simply disappear, illegally.

    An acquaintance of mine was in a department, and when he went in to do his last job, he found out that the IT people had come down and wiped out his hard drive, wiped out his network drive. And somebody had come in and decided that he should have a nice, clean office, and cleaned out all the files and all the papers. He couldn't find them. He said it took him a year to be able to put back the paperwork.

    Well, these are the signs of a system under enormous stress, and when the government cut back, it cut back an awful lot of the infrastructure. We see that in the Auditor General's comments, that she can no longer have confidence in the paper trail of financial expenditures. We see it in my concerns, that we can no longer find the paper trail--even when it's there--from time to time.

  (1220)  

    The good new is, some departments, some sections of departments, have excellent document control, even to this day. You can find everything you need when you go there. But there are other sections that have very little, if any.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: How many investigators do you have to do research on the files? What is your staff or how many inspectors to you have to verify the information?

    We have to accept the information we are given. Can we ask your office to conduct inquiries or investigations?

[English]

    Mr. John Reid: We have 25 investigators. Those investigators are more than fully occupied by the amount of work we now have. We're not looking for any more work, I can assure you.

    I can give you an example of how difficult it has been for us. When I became commissioner four and a half years ago, our investigations took an average of about four months. We're now up to seven and a half months. That is a statistic I take no pleasure in giving you. But we have a lot of work to do.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): Mr. Tirabassi.

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi: Thank you, Madam Chair.

    You have referred on a couple of occasions to the Auditor General's review of the contract file. She did indeed make mention of the difficulty she had in obtaining certain records to go further into the investigation. She also, I might add, did mention that this is not, in her opinion, the way in which business was done generally across the government.

    I mean, we can keep going back to that file and--

    Mr. John Reid: No, I want to say that I understand that point. The comments I have been using, from Madam Fraser and also her predecessor, have been general comments. If you'd like an explanation in some depth, in Mr. Desautels' 10-year report there is a section dealing with the breakdown of the audit trail, which Madam Fraser has agreed is in fact the case.

    I agree with you that the example that was used in the case of the public works contracts is an exceptional one. I always try to refer to it in terms of the general case, with the breakdown in general in various departments, as has been documented by both auditors general.

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi: I appreciate your comments on that as well.

    I'm just wondering, on your comparisons with what other countries are actually doing, other jurisdictions, with regard to managing their information, is there any specific country or model that could be more useful in trying to create a better information management system here in Canada? Where are we?

    Mr. John Reid: I would say we're probably on the “bleeding edge”. We're on the bleeding edge because when we decided to start cutting back in the seventies, the people we cut back were the file clerks, the secretaries, and the librarians. They were the first ones to go in the late seventies, and it turns out they were the information handlers. They were the ones who managed the information flows within the government. The expectation was, we'll get rid of these people, and with computers coming in, we'll be on the--quote--“information highway”.

    Well, we're a long way from the information highway within the government.

    Every person then became his own information manager, his own secretary, his own file clerk, and his own librarian. But none of us had any training in that, and none of us have been able to get any training in that. The training people were removed. So everybody was left to cope the best they could with the information flowing at them.

    The system hung together for about 15 years. When the government went through program review and we began to eliminate positions within the public system, the ones who went were the senior people, and they were the ones who had done the mentoring. They were the human capital. If you couldn't find a document, at least you could find somebody who knew something about the subject matter.

    The problem now within the public service is that most of those people are gone, within five years the rest will have gone, and there's going to be no human memory. So you not only can't find the documentation, you can't find anybody who handled it before.

    We've already seen a number of instances where you can't find the documents and you can't find the people, and the government can't move. Or if it moves, it does so without proper information.

    So we're on the bleeding edge because in a sense we've put ourselves there.

    This isn't to say that everybody else, in all the governments across Canada, isn't wrestling with the same problems. In the private sector they are also wrestling with the same problems. These are difficult questions we all have to deal with.

    One of the things that's so fascinating is that the information quality on the web is so erratic now. When the Web started up, I, like Mr. Epp, was one of the early adopters, and it was a wonderful place where there was accurate information. When you go on the Web now you can't be sure that the information you're looking at or downloading is actually accurate. There's no way of being able to authenticate the information on the Web.

    One of the good things about the Government of Canada websites is that the information you get has usually been authenticated, and it's good, solid material.

  (1225)  

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi: Very good.

    Thank you.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): Do you have any further questions, Mr. Forseth?

    Mr. Paul Forseth: Perhaps as a last summary question, do you have a recommendation on basically how you could work yourself out of a job? Because I would think that at some point that's the objective direction we should be going in, that everything is available and you don't need any advocate to get something--perhaps just an arbitrator related to cabinet confidences or something to do with national security. If someone can't make the case that something must be secure or inaccessible, it by rights should be all there, and when it's created in the first place, always created according to certain standards that are searchable, available to everybody. In essence, then, we won't need people like you.

    Do you see a way to get there?

    Mr. John Reid: If, as you basically said, all information is available on demand, you wouldn't need the Information Commissioner. But you'd have to say “all” information, because as soon as you start saying that “some” information is to be restricted, you have to have somebody to make that decision. And that somebody can be the courts, as they do in the United States, or it can be an ombudsman-type official, like the Information Commissioner.

    The system that works best for the citizen is the ombudsman. The one that works best for the government is the courts. In one case you have to pay to go to court; the government pays for the ombudsman. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to pay for the ombudsman than it is to have everybody going to court.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: But how are we going to get to that day when it really is to do with national security issues, or cabinet confidences--the real tight stuff? It appears we're still fighting over stuff that we shouldn't be fighting over. How do we change that culture?

    Mr. John Reid: It's not a culture. It's basically what's in the Access to Information Act, and you have to look at the Access to Information Act, because that's the one that rules on whether or not an individual member of the public service can give out information or not.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: Okay, so a legislative solution...?

    Mr. John Reid: There's a legislative solution where you should go through this and say, okay, we don't need this protection, and this information can go out. The more of this that you can do, the less work there is going to be for the Information Commissioner.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: That's what I was talking about, providing answers to us so that you can kind of work yourself out of a job.

    Mr. John Reid: That's the way you do it, by changing the legislation so that more information flows automatically to citizens.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: Thank you.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Judy Sgro): No further questions?

    Thank you very much, Mr. Reid. It's been very interesting to hear your answers to many of our questions. Your presentation document was easy to read and very informative. Thank you very much.

    Who knows, in future we may have you back just as you're leaving your job because we've been able to work the system such that we no longer need an information commissioner.

    Good luck, and thank you very much.

    If there is no other business, I'll move adjournment of the meeting.