ETHI Committee Report

INTRODUCTION

This Committee, established by all-party agreement at the beginning of the 1st Session of this Parliament, held its first meeting in October 2004. The Committee’s mandate gives it responsibility for matters related to Canada’s Information and Privacy Commissioners, and the Ethics Commissioner, with respect to his responsibilities under the Parliament of Canada Act relating to public office holders. In launching our deliberations in the fall of 2004, the Committee began by holding meetings with these three Commissioners on their Main Estimates. In the course of those meetings, the Committee was made aware of a fairly long-standing concern about the manner in which Officers of Parliament are funded.

The Hon. John Reid, Information Commissioner of Canada, reported to the Committee that he was hindered in meeting his statutory obligations by inadequate resources. He indicated that both the investigatory and non-investigatory staff groups in his Office are significantly understaffed, and that a backlog of cases has resulted. Also, his Office has had to give up its public affairs, research, and education and training capacities.

We are in a financial crisis. The cause of that has been that resources have not kept pace with the workload that is imposed on the office. … Despite repeated attempts to convince Treasury Board to properly fund the full range of the Commissioner's mandate, including several exhaustive reviews by independent, outside consultants, taken jointly with the Treasury Board Secretariat, emergency and partial funding has only been forthcoming. (3 November 2004)

The Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, explained that her Office currently relies on two streams of funding, one under the Main Estimates, providing the Office with funding for its operations under the Privacy Act, and another relating to its responsibilities under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The Office originally received $6.7 million to fund its operations relating to PIPEDA, but that funding ceased at the end of the 2003-2004 fiscal year, and has since been renewed on an annual basis under the Supplementary Estimates. The need to reconcile these two streams of funding and ensure that the Office’s long-term financial needs are met is the subject of ongoing negotiations between her Office and the Treasury Board Secretariat. Ms. Stoddart indicated that her Office would make a submission to the Treasury Board Secretariat for long-term permanent funding in 2005.

In the case of the Privacy Commissioner, her concern about funding had less to do with the adequacy of funds, and more to do with the mechanism by which the Office is funded. She argued that it lacks the financial independence from government that would be appropriate given its functions.

In addition to the fact that [the Office is] an Officer of Parliament, we must consider the very nature of our ombudsman role on privacy issues for the public and private sectors. As an ombudsman and oversight agency of government for Parliament, we investigate and audit other federal departments and agencies. The necessary independence of our role as an ombudsman has been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 2002 Lavigne¹ decision which states that we are “... independent of the government's administrative institutions.” (10 February 2005)

The Committee is concerned about the issues raised by these Officers of Parliament, and launched this study to investigate concerns about the funding of their offices.

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1

Lavigne v. Canada (Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages), 2002 SCC 53, available on-line at http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/csc-scc/cgi-bin/disp.pl/en/pub/2002/vol2/html/2002scr2_0773.html?query=%22Lavigne%22&langue=en&selection=&database=en/jug&method=all&retour=/csc-scc/cgi-bin/srch.pl?language=en~~method=all~~database=en%2Fjug~~query=Lavigne~~x=8~~y=10.