Information & Ethics committee  I don't have the authority myself to do a criminal investigation. My investigations are administrative. However, as soon as I have evidence that a potential criminal offence has taken place, I can refer it to the prosecutor, who will then decide whether they do further investigation.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm sorry. It's the Attorney General, for them to decide whether they want to pursue it. I've done this approximately seven times since the beginning of my—

Information & Ethics committee  They can refer it to the RCMP for investigation.

Information & Ethics committee  Most of the time it's because the institutions didn't do their homework before they asked for a permission not to disclose. The duty to assist is very important. When somebody is asking for an enormous number of files, it's not because there are a lot of documents that the request itself is unreasonable.

Information & Ethics committee  There is already a provision under the act that if you are doing anything—changing a document, erasing a document, destroying a document—it could be a criminal offence. If I see evidence of intentional measures to take away access, I can refer it to the Attorney General.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  As you said, we receive an enormous number of complaints relating to access to information requests made to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, to the point that two years ago, I initiated a systemic investigation. From that, we saw that the information systematically requested by agents representing immigrants or refugees is often information that should be available on the department's portal.

Information & Ethics committee  I would invite you to talk to the Treasury Board for specifics. I know there's a staffing pool that was created by TBS, which was going to be shared by institutions for trying to hire new analysts. That's something I was told was done recently, and it's something that's definitely needed, because every institution is in need—

Information & Ethics committee  We need more resources. We need a classification program. We need training. When I talk about resources, it's not just human resources, but financial resources, innovations.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  As you know, there were not a lot of changes, but one of the changes that really helped was giving me the authority to issue orders instead of only recommendations. I can tell you that when institutions know that an order is coming, they're moving a little faster. So it has helped us to deal with files and get informal resolutions.

Information & Ethics committee  No.

Information & Ethics committee  We are funded now to be closing 4,000 cases. We have 7,000 cases, and we're going to about 10,000, so we're definitely going to need more resources. I'm going to be in the process of asking for extra funding soon, including for our publishing capacity, because you have to translate everything.

Information & Ethics committee  It would be about 15%. Those are results and orders, or reports that—

Information & Ethics committee  Last year, we did 6,500. A lot of those were informally resolved. We put all of our money into our investigations last year. We cannot sustain that. We have to help our corporate services, legal services and translation services. Knowing also that this is increasing, our statistics show that if we don't get extra funding....