Annual Report: 2004-2005

Year after year, information commissioners have asked Treasury Board ministers to provide adequate (not extravagant) funds to enable commissioners to effectively discharge the duties Parliament gave them. The requests are routinely denied or pared down to bare bones.

Year after year, the Information Commissioner’s workload of complaints increases and, without adequate resources, the backlog of incomplete investigations also increases. Now, it ranks at an all-time high; it represents more than a full year of work for every one of the commissioner’s 23 investigators. In 1986, parliamentarians reviewed the operations of the Access to Information Act and asked the Information Commissioner to aim to complete investigations in 90 days. That target has never been met due to lack of resources. This year, the median time to completion of an investigation is some six months.

Again, this year, the commissioner put forward a request for seven additional investigators for three years to clear the backlog, and eight additional investigators for the long-term to ensure that the backlog did not redevelop. Treasury Board ministers agreed to give the commissioner five additional investigators for fifteen months and none for the long-term. Resources for such a short-term would, for all practical purposes, be wasted. In one year, the commissioner could not recruit for only one year, train, security clear and deploy five new investigators to accomplish any appreciable reduction of the backlog. Moreover, with no permanent increase to the number of investigators, the incoming workload will still outstrip the resources available, contributing to more backlogged investigations. The commissioner told the President of Treasury Board that the Board’s response to the commissioner’s request was a recipe for failure and a waste of taxpayer funds. The minister’s response: Try again next year.

And that, of course, is the deep flaw in the manner in which the commissioner’s office is funded – due to its control of the purse strings, the government has control over the effectiveness of Parliament’s officer. So much for independence!

It is vital that Parliament take over the role of ensuring the commissioner get adequate resources to do the job and, of course, holding him or her accountable for how resources are utilized. Parliament took such a step with one of its officers, the Ethics Commissioner. It is equally important that it do so for the Information Commissioner and the other officers of Parliament who are mandated to investigate government actions and decisions.

In February 2005, the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics launched a study into this issue. The government, too, is considering proposals for a funding mechanism for officers of Parliament which is not controlled by the government of the day. In the meantime, this funding gap cries out for immediate redress.