In preparing for today’s remarks, I wondered whether some of you in this room may view me, and the statute that I am sworn to uphold – The Access to Information Act – as an enemy or irritant or an impediment to you in the performance of your own duties. For some that may be true, yet I hope to persuade you that this is not the case; that doing financial management in a fishbowl, which is how you must feel some days, is an occupational hazard for you notwithstanding the access law, and is a positive state of affairs if we are to have honest government in a healthy democracy.

Federal financial managers, more than any other professional group, are feeling the fallout of the public’s preoccupation with, and insistence on, integrity, honesty and transparency in government. More than ever before – especially since the Radwanski, Sponsorship and HRDC scandals – financial managers have been put in the spotlight of scrutiny.

I have titled my remarks "financial management in a fishbowl", because that is today’s reality and, you who are in the fishbowl, face enormous challenges. As secrecy diminishes, there will be less willingness on the part of ministers to take the heat for their officials. Fingers of blame will be pointed farther down into the bureaucracy. We are seeing this trend already.

As I begin, however, I want to acknowledge the extra burdens of information capture and reporting, recently placed on financial managers. At times, it seems that skittish central agencies are responding to scandal with a flurry of more red tape without providing the resources necessary to integrate new control processes and meet new reporting requirements. I am thinking, for example, of the development of new program activity architectures (or PAAs) and the reengineering of Estimates documents to conform with new PAAs.

Of course, Annual Reference Level Updates (or "ARLUs") must also conform to new PAAs and a new, on-line, reporting process. There is, too, the care and feeding of the Expenditure Management Information System (EMIS) and all of the surveys associated with EMIS. And there is the production of financial statements and, in some cases audited financial statements with all the arcane and fluid accrual rules.

Now, superimpose on all of this a new round of downsizing – to the tune of $12 billion – (already the expenditure management review process is being quietly referred to as the most expensive, labor intensive approach to an across the board cut, of all time!) We can’t forget the ongoing studies about common services and management accountability frameworks and the information demands from increasingly powerful and activist Parliamentary committees.

Squeezed in among these requirements are the pro-active disclosure policies for senior level travel and hospitality expenses, contracts over $10,000, reclassifications, and others to come, such as grants and contributions, call ups against standing offers and so forth.

This enormous workload, associated tight deadlines and inadequate resources to do the job is – I feel sure – uppermost in your minds as members of the financial management community. The burden makes it almost impossible for you to critically assess and provide feedback on the wisdom of the new policies, rules and procedures – and so, Treasury Board is getting a pass – at least for now. And the burden makes it equally difficult for members of this community to see the larger picture of how fundamentally important your work is to the achievement of effective, accountable government. That is a great pity!

It is to your ranks, it seems to me, that ministers and deputy ministers should be looking for wise counsel in the great endeavor of reclaiming a reputation, for the public service, of excellence, courage, integrity and caring for the public interest. These are qualities, in my experience, often found and more expected in financial managers than any other professional group.

Your professional community is certainly dear to the heart of an Information Commissioner because full disclosure and careful documentation are part of the ethical underpinning of this community. It is a tenet of your professionalism that all material information concerning financial status, decisions, transactions and expenditures should be captured in records, meaningfully presented and disclosed to managers, auditors and Parliament and be preserved for trends analysis, forensic review and historical interest. These kinds of information management practices are precisely what the Access to Information Act was designed to encourage.

I want to make a stab at enlisting this community as a champion for the right of access, because you are "poster persons" for what public officials in a true culture of openness might look like.

Yet, I am fully aware that there are pressures on financial managers – just as there are on internal auditors – to refrain from putting too much down on paper and to "dumb down" reports and advice into neutral, non-controversial language. And, in my experience, there remains an unfortunate instinct in some managers to resort to altering, concealing, backdating or destroying records which are potentially embarrassing or incriminating. I wager that some in this room have had such a temptation or been asked by others, to engage in such practices.

I hasten to add that it is also my experience that financial managers are more likely to resist such temptations and requests than are other public servants. In large measure, that is because you are governed by strict accountability obligations set out in the Financial Administration Act. The FAA, for example, gives clear guidance to financial managers concerning their obligation to create records to document financial authorizations, justifications, outcomes and trends.

The FAA also makes it abundantly clear that financial records must be accurate and must be preserved. Section 80 of the FAA makes it an indictable offence for a financial manager to make a false record. Section 82, stipulates that all records created or kept by a financial manager are "deemed to be chattels belonging to Her Majesty" – in other words, such records have a protected status from any interference – including alteration, destruction or conversion.

Section 80 of the FAA also makes it an indictable offence for any financial manager to fail to report, in writing, to a superior, any contravention of the FAA or any revenue law of Canada, that comes to his or her knowledge.

Of course, the FAA requires public reporting and accountability to Parliament with respect to the requisitioning and expenditure of public funds.

This is a very stringent régime for accountability through transparency. By law, in the financial management area, Parliament has expressed its intention that there be no dark corners of secrecy where webs of intrigue can be woven. This is precisely the level of accountability which Parliament wanted to extend to all public officials when it passed the Access to Information Act. In a sense, financial managers were trailblazers – you were the first to go into the fishbowl and you have a great deal to teach other public officials about how to acclimatize.

You, after all, are the folks in government who have been living under the legal obligation to be "right doers" – I don’t know of any other professional group which has such an obligation by statute. Indirectly, however, the Access to Information Act, is bringing all officials up to your level of accountability.

Being a champion of transparency does not mean that I am blind to legitimate reasons for secrecy. There are 13 set out in the Act and I respect them all. In your work, one area of concern that has come to my attention has to do with the treatment, under the Act, of drafts of internal and external audit reports. Both auditors and financial managers have told me that, until all auditee observations are taken into account, and audits finalized, audits should remain secret.

I think there is some merit to this concern and I want to share my thoughts with you about public access to draft audit reports.

First, some background is in order. The public access to audit reports became a matter of intense discussion at the time of the audit of the transitional job fund at HRDC and the aftermath of that audit. As a result of requests for copies of that audit, and the front-page headlines that dominated the news for weeks on end, the Treasury Board Secretariat sent a memorandum to all Heads of Review, Audit and Evaluation, as well as to all departments and agencies, on the topic of "Releasing of review, audit and evaluation reports."

The Treasury Board Secretariat reminded departments and agencies that "Canadian citizens have a right to know, and that both the Review, Audit, Evaluation Policy and the ATIP are intended to allow that and facilitate it as much as possible. It is very important to remember that, according to the Review, Audit and Evaluation Policy, ALL COMPLETED reports are public documents and you should make them available if requested without requiring a formal request and under such circumstances, no fee should be collected. A further memorandum three days later, clarified the policy with regard to draft reports which had not yet been completed and reminded departments and agencies that all request for draft reports should be dealt with through the normal access to information process.

At the same time, however, Treasury Board reminded all departments that it and PCO wanted advance knowledge of any audit "bad news" so that appropriate communications plans could be developed. The message was clear – your audit reports may have to be made public, but the government would prefer them not to be embarrassing.

Coming back to the status of draft reports, I recognize that early drafts of audit reports may be radically different from final reports in context and tone. Many changes occur as a result of consultations between the auditor and auditees. Financial managers know well that auditing is, in some senses, a subjective, interpretive exercise open to reasonable differences of opinion. The to and fro is essential as audits develop. I accept that, until the "to"ing and "fro"ing is complete, release of a draft audit report can completely misrepresent the situation and adversely affect the audit itself as well as reputations and careers.

Thus, I have accepted that audits are a type of investigation which can be injured by disclosure of unverified, untested, incomplete drafts. The exemption I have accepted is paragraph 16(1)(c) of the Access to Information Act. However, I have not been ready to give a blanket green light to exempting all draft audit reports. Too often, I see audits which drag on for years and which remain as perpetual drafts. These, in my view, should be disclosed. As well, I often find that so-called drafts are really complete in every sense except for the development of a communications plan for the minister or except for completion of a non-substantive approval process. These are not reasons for keeping "draft" audits secret, in my view.

Members of the financial community have also raised concern that the Access to Information Act may discourage the reporting of wrongdoing. Will the name of the whistleblower be disclosed? Will the names of those against whom allegations are made, be disclosed?

These concerns have caused the government to include in Bill C-11 a new exemption to the Access to Information Act for information obtained or prepared by a person to whom wrongdoing may be reported. The proposed exemption would cover such information for 20 years.

I am very troubled by this proposal and have so testified before the Standing Committee reviewing Bill C-11.

In my view, this new exemption is designed, perhaps unintentionally, to protect the government, not whistleblowers or persons against whom accusations are made. The Access to Information Act already has strong protections for ongoing investigative material (as we just discussed in relation to audits) and strong protections for personal information such as the identities of whistleblowers and accused persons.

By going beyond the need to protect identities and ongoing investigations – by extending secrecy for 20 years – to all information about alleged wrongdoing and the investigation thereof, the government, will have a new and powerful tool to keep instances of wrongdoing under wraps. As a concrete example of my concern, here is what I described to the Parliamentary Committee:

The most current example of the relationship between whistleblowing and the Access to Information Act is the sponsorship scandal, which has resulted in the establishment of the Gomery Commission of Inquiry. As we have learned, the problems with the management of the sponsorship program came to light, in the first place, when internal audits of the program were requested and released, to the media and opposition, under the Access to Information Act. Once released, the troubling conclusions of these records were brought to the attention of Parliament and the Auditor General and the rest, as they say, is history. These internal audits, as we now know, were conducted as a result of an internal disclosure of wrongdoing by Mr. Allan Cutler and others – and yet those audits and their troubling results were not made public until access requests were received. What, you may ask, is the point! It is this: provisions of Bill C-11, if they had been in force when Mr. Cutler made his internal disclosure, would have authorized PWGSC to refuse under the Access to Information Act to disclose those early audits of the sponsorship program.

Indeed, if Bill C-11 passes in its current form, any whistleblower who suffers reprisals, will face secrecy for 20 years when his or her lawyer tries to get, under the Access to Information Act, the records pertaining to how the department responded to their disclosure of wrongdoing.

Again, I come back to my theme: openness and transparency are the allies of public officials just as they are the ingredients for accountable government. Please do not let your judgment of the Access to Information Act be formed solely by your frustration at having to respond to access requests within tight deadlines and with insufficient resources. Of course that is frustrating. Instead, keep in mind the bigger picture. This law is designed to make all public servants as accountable as financial managers have been for some time. This law is designed to make it harder for governments to make scapegoats of the innocent and heroes of the guilty.

Some years ago, a Parliamentary Committee report stated that the Access to Information Act and Privacy Act are second only to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in shifting power from the state to the individual. We public officials are individuals as well as state officers. We can make this law work and, in so doing, gain power as individuals and make our government more democratically healthy and accountable. That is a noble calling!

In closing may I thank you again for your hard and under-appreciated work to make government effective and accountable. I have been a minister of the Crown and I can tell you that most ministers are afraid of public servants willing to kill them with kindness; they welcome those ready to give them the unvarnished truth. If you are the straight-shooting kind of public servant, you have nothing to fear and much to gain from a vibrant Access to Information Act.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you. I will be happy to answer any questions that you may have.