Information & Ethics committee  Unfortunately, I do not have jurisdiction over those documents and they are excluded from the Access to Information Act at present. All my office receives is a confirmation by the institution that certain pages requested are covered by that exclusion. In the past, I have recommended an independent review mechanism and that my office be authorized at least to see these excluded documents, to be able to confirm that they are actually cabinet confidences.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, but I do not disclose anything. All I do is determine whether or not the exemption has been properly applied.

Information & Ethics committee  It's my pleasure.

Information & Ethics committee  To me, without information, without knowing what decisions are being taken on what facts and on what data, and what money is being spent, Canadians are not aware. We keep talking about Canadians losing trust in our democracy and losing trust in our governments. Interestingly enough, the municipal levels are the most public.

Information & Ethics committee  The legislation now is requiring proactive disclosure of a lot of the information that was already covered by policies before. The one thing that's been added, and it's very useful, is the list of titles for briefing notes. At the same time, when you see the title, what happens is that the requesters are now asking for the document they want to see, or people are very creative in the title so it doesn't really say what the briefing note is about.

Information & Ethics committee  I think you mean a culture of secrecy. Again, it really depends on the organization in question and its deputy minister, directors general and staff. Each organization is different. As I was saying, none of them is perfect. However, we see a huge difference when the leader asks for statistics about access to information in order to know where the bottlenecks are.

Information & Ethics committee  That really depends on how the contract was drafted. Sometimes, it contains confidentiality clauses. It is really hard to name the reasons off the top of my head, because each case is different. At the Office of the Commissioner, we encourage people who prepare contracts to be as transparent as possible and let the contractor know that the information is going to be accessible to Canadians, who want to know where their money is going and how decisions are made.

Information & Ethics committee  In my submissions to Treasury Board, I believe I actually made a recommendation that any organization that functions on behalf of the government and is using public funds to do service for Canadians should be subject to the act. That would make both Crown corporations and private entities that are sometimes contracted to work for the government subject to the act.

Information & Ethics committee  I believe in freedom, and I believe that it should be free. To me, $5 is very reasonable, and I think Canadians are very lucky to be able to access information for no fees at all. The problem is that because we're not very good at managing our information and because some requesters are asking for enormous numbers of documents, that has created a huge, sometimes very overwhelming, amount of paper and documents to go through for institutions.

Information & Ethics committee  The act is there to make government accountable and to improve our democracy. Who will be judging whether the request is made with that intent? It's really difficult. For a journalist, yes, you're asking sometimes for more than you want because maybe you're looking for stories or you want to make sure you don't miss anything.

Information & Ethics committee  I have the list here. Treasury Board is not in my top 20, so they're not doing badly at all, but none of the departments are doing great. Everybody is having difficulties meeting the 30-day time limit, and there are a lot of issues with extensions. My office has received 70% more complaints this year than last year.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, every year it's a record, and not a good record.

Information & Ethics committee  As you can expect, if you are asking the Department of Justice for information, most of their information is protected by solicitor-client privilege, under section 23. However, that being said, not all communication between lawyers is. I am a lawyer and I do a lot of communication that is not subject to solicitor-client privilege.

Information & Ethics committee  It really depends on the case. We have to look at the documents themselves, which I have the authority to do.

Information & Ethics committee  I do, so if you make a complaint—