Information & Ethics Committee on April 24th, 2013

[Suzanne Legault]

Our team is very small. So we are all doing other people's work.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

That is why I want to come back to your small team. Is your team small because the government is not giving your organization enough money? This government talks about transparency—it got itself elected in 2006 on a transparency platform—and you, Ms. Legault, just said that your team is very small and that you have 2,000 active files. That's a lot. So shouldn't this transparent government—this dear transparent government of ours—increase the funding instead of reducing it?

[Suzanne Legault]

You will hear me talk about this over the next few weeks. We will meet to discuss the main estimates. Now that I have been on the job for four years, I firmly believe that—with all the measures we have taken to improve efficiency—if the office does not receive additional resources to conduct investigations, our ability to process the remaining 1,800 files will definitely be threatened. I will let you draw your own conclusions. That is not my job.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

I would like to come back to the cost issue.

Ms. Legault, you said that it made no sense for someone to have to pay up to $500 to obtain documents. You said that you should adopt measures to make those documents available. You also said that the process could even end up costing you more and that it would perhaps be better to abolish those fees.

Don't you rather think that the government could care less about that $500 and that the goal is simply to discourage people who don't have that kind of money from submitting complains? An ordinary person cannot necessarily afford $500 for information. The government thinks nothing at all of spending $10,000 to prevent people from submitting complaints.

[Suzanne Legault]

In departments—and this is what we really see—access to information professionals make decisions on ways to proceed. They follow their guidelines when it comes to fees and charge applicants accordingly. I don't think there are any great non-transparency designs here. People respond—

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

I am talking about the amount you yourself said you disagreed with.

[Suzanne Legault]

I don't agree with charging fees for access to information. Internationally, countries are much more likely not to charge fees.

Be that as it may, from a much more practical perspective, I would like to point out that, first of all, fees never ensure costs recovery. Second of all, the costs of cashing in a $5 cheque is higher than the value of the cheque. I am sure of that. In addition, fee implementation leads to complaints. The investigation of complaints is expensive. As I was telling your colleague, we do not impose fees just to end up investigating complaints.

I think our system lacks efficiency and effectiveness. This is not a way to recover costs. It's not my job to decide whether or not the government's actions are transparent. I simply find that, from a practical perspective, this is not an effective approach.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Mr. Godin, your time is up.

Mr. Dreeshen, you have five minutes.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Ms. Legault, for being here today.

I remember back in 2009 I was also on this committee. You were here and we talked a lot about report cards, and we talked a lot about the different types of issues that were taking place. Of course, one of the discussions had to do with staff turnover. I would like to kind of draw that out just a little bit.

You want to make sure you have that institutional knowledge, so that it's easy for you when you group all of these different files together, that it's working well. I'm just wondering, when you're talking about your strategic plan, and you talk about how the organization is almost fully staffed...I wonder if you can talk about your staffing situation, plus the concept of the institutional knowledge that actually does exist.

[Suzanne Legault]

Actually this past year has been quite difficult in terms of staffing because of the cuts in my office. Two years ago, because we had the cost containment measures, I significantly reduced our internal services quite a lot, and we were able to find positions for all the people where we had to cut positions.

This past fiscal year, though...I must be very honest, I wasn't expecting my office to have cuts to its budget, given our financial situation. We had to go through a workforce adjustment process, and because I wanted to protect my employees, I actually kept vacant positions for them; I cut positions in the chiefs and the higher levels in the organization. I didn't cut any investigator positions, but I had vacant investigator positions. In order to secure my employees' employment, I kept those positions open.

That process finished in late January, and we have started a staffing process now. I have eight vacant positions in my investigative functions now. I knew I was going to cut some, and I kept the lower-level positions empty until people had decided what they were going to do. Now we're going to staff those positions

I still try to reallocate some funding to investigations out of the internal services. We have 42 positions now just to do investigations. I'm hoping to increase that a little bit within the allocated budget. I have eight vacant positions, which I have basically staffed with consultants since the end of the fiscal....

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

So you feel fairly confident that you can bring in replacements who will have the skills you require to fit in well with the staff you already have.

[Suzanne Legault]

It's a challenge in the access to information world. In the new staffing process, however, I have asked that applicants have university degrees. The other thing I did...about 18 months ago I shifted a little bit. I increased the number of lawyers within the organization. I have lawyers more involved with the investigations. I find that this better supplements the difficult investigations at an earlier stage, and that's working better. I'm looking at that sort of complement all the time. The lawyers' involvement with the investigators at an earlier stage actually works well. We need to constantly do training. We do in-house training on the various provisions of the act.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

With regard to the code of conduct, taking a look at that side of it, because if we're going to talk about people who are there or who have moved on.... In the 2012 Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector, you have guidelines on conflict of interest and post-employment. They are scheduled to come into effect in 2012-13. Has your code of conduct come into effect, and how is that implementation going?

[Suzanne Legault]

As part of our strategic plan, we consulted our employees, and we basically chose our values at the office. This is part of our strategic plan. As to the code of values and ethics, that's a good question. I think we're still applying the one from the Treasury Board Secretariat. We are having an internal audit committee in May. Our external audit committee, coming up at the end of May, is focused on human resources. That's when we'll be discussing values and the code of ethics for the organization.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

In table 4, we have the institutions that received the most requests and the percentage of requests. I wonder if you could comment on volume versus complexity. We don't have to go through all of them, but we do get a lot in certain areas. How complicated is it for you to deal with this? Can you give us a quick overview?

[Suzanne Legault]

When you try to understand access to information at the federal level, one thing that everyone has to remember is that Citizenship and Immigration Canada receives half of the total requests across the system. The increase that we've seen over the years is mostly within Citizenship and Immigration Canada. If Citizenship and Immigration Canada performs well, the overall system will perform well. If CIC doesn't perform well, the whole system will come down. They are the main driver of government performance in access to information. The other groups in table 4 of my handouts are essentially the top 10 institutions. These are the ones that also have an impact on statistics.

The Canada Revenue Agency has a large volume of complex requests. But CIC doesn't; 80% of their requests are less than 100 pages. We've just received that from the recently published disaggregated statistics. In half of the system, the requests have a low number of pages. The exemptions there are simple to apply. You will find complexity in the other agencies. In the top 10 you have more complexity, investigations, commercial information, and national security.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Mr. Dreeshen, your time is up.

I will yield the floor to Mr. Andrews, for five minutes.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Getting back to the CBC and the progress that has been made after the ruling, can you give us some idea of how that ruling freed things up with regard to the number of requests at the CBC? Why are there still 200 outstanding with the CBC?

[Suzanne Legault]

It's because we're working through them.

With the ruling, we got the records. We hadn't received the records, so we couldn't investigate; we didn't have the documents. That basically allowed us to do the investigation.

Out of the 214, there are 113 that are section 68.1 cases. Out of the numerous cases that I have seen so far in four years, 1,100 or so, and I'm saying this because perhaps the private member's bill in relation to CBC is going to come up, there have been no cases where there's been an issue with journalistic sources.

All of the issues really relate to creative programming material. We're working our way through the various facts of each file and trying to resolve them on the analysis that we're working our way through. So far we have resolved our cases with the CBC, and as I said, we are working very closely with the CBC. I think the assistant commissioner meets every month with the CBC to go through the files. We have a priority system. We deal with these files. So they are moving along.

Eventually, we will come to a disagreement, I'm sure, on the interpretation of that section, but so far we haven't gotten there.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

So far there's been no disagreement on that section of the act? The information that was requested has actually gone out?

[Suzanne Legault]

It's a little bit more complicated than that. In the annual report you will see more details of some of these investigations that have gone through. You can have issues in relation to commercial information, for instance, and then there's general administration and then there's program and creative material.

Each case is fact-dependent, so I really can't talk about a specific file. It's extremely complex to work this through, but the institution is cooperating. We are completing the cases. So far, certainly, we have not taken a case to court, and the complainants, so far, have not taken a case to court.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

What ongoing cases in your office are consuming most of your resources? Are there some that are consuming the majority of your resources?

[Suzanne Legault]

It's the three groups: CBC, CRA, and special delegation.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

You mentioned going to court. How many cases do you have before the courts right now?

[Suzanne Legault]

I don't have a lot. I actually provided this to you in that document, in case you wondered. If you go to the last page of that handout, you have the last four years and how many cases were in court. That doesn't include the appeals or leaves to intervene in higher courts, but this is essentially what we had in court. This year I have six in court.