Information & Ethics committee  No. There hasn’t been one yet.

Information & Ethics committee  I am unable to give you details. However, from what I understand, when the Minister of National Defence is unable to respond, even though he said he wanted to, it’s often due to a lack of resources.

Information & Ethics committee  I would have to carefully check the affidavits for each case. They are all different. If you want, I can send you the reasons provided by the Minister of National Defence, which are in the documents he produced.

Information & Ethics committee  It's two different things. The six cases the office referred to the Attorney General were with respect to investigations in which we felt there was reasonable evidence of an intent to obstruct the access requests.

Information & Ethics committee  I will have to send you a list, because some of them are from before my time. It's usually because we believe there's a possible criminal charge coming up. The four mandamuses are separate.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't really know where the $1.1 million comes from, because the last time I received money, it was $3 million a year since 2020. Is it possible that it's the Privacy Commissioner you're referring to?

Information & Ethics committee  Now I think I understand what you're saying. It's the additional funds for collective agreements for all of our employees. I would say that 75% of our employees received an increase in the last four years, so that would be covering that.

Information & Ethics committee  First of all, the act, because it's 40 years old, needs to be modernized in terms of its purpose. Right now, I don't have access to cabinet confidence, so those documents are not reviewed by my office. That's something, I think, that's problematic, because the section to say that something is subject to cabinet confidence is being used more and more, and there is nobody independent from the government right now investigating those documents.

Information & Ethics committee  When I arrived as the new commissioner in 2018, the first thing I set in motion was to be more efficient so investigations could be done in a timely manner. We added tasks and timelines to all of those, and we follow them. We don't give extra unlimited time to institutions to respond to us anymore.

Information & Ethics committee  No, they are public.

Information & Ethics committee  Processing these applications required resources. We had to give these cases to our in-house counsel. Otherwise, they would have been investigative files. Our lawyers have to dedicate time to presenting an application to the Federal Court to force an organization to respect its obligations.

Information & Ethics committee  As I said earlier, Trans Mountain Corporation was one of the first organizations to refuse to obey an order. The three other cases involve the Department of National Defence.

Information & Ethics committee  It's their decision. It's within their authority to decide what they investigate or not.

Information & Ethics committee  It's really hard to tell what would make institutions understand their obligations and the fact that it's important that they respect the law, that the requests must be responded to within a certain time, and that the orders of the commissioner must be complied with. Who's responsible, ultimately?

Information & Ethics committee  Under my submission for amendments to the act, I suggested that it be changed to a referral to the appropriate authorities. That would open my authority to refer to the RCMP or to another police authority. Right now it's very specific that it has to be referred to the Attorney General.