I am grateful to this committee for undertaking a study into the manner in which certain officers of Parliament, the Information Commissioner included, are funded. During a previous appearance, I expressed my concern and frustration at not being given by the government adequate resources to effectively carry out my statutory mandate. I also emphasized that no Officer of Parliament wants a blank cheque – we should have to justify our resource requests and account for our expenditures. Yet, I also expressed my view that there is an inherent danger in allowing the government, against whom all complaints we investigate are made, to have total control over our resources. There can be no true independence from the government of the day as long as it controls the resources of Officers of Parliament.
Your decision to inquire into this fundamental concern, which all Officers of Parliament share to one degree or another, is one which I welcome as being long overdue. I will assist you in your deliberations in any way I am able.
Before I end these opening remarks, I want to say how much I am looking forward to hearing from my colleague the Ethics Commissioner, because his office has a funding mechanism which is independent of the government of the day. It is to the House of Commons that he turns to justify resource requests. I believe that is a model which should be explored for the rest of us. I do add this caution: When there is a majority government, even Parliamentary funding mechanisms may not entirely insulate Officers of Parliament from efforts by the government to weaken them through resource starvation.
It is for that reason that the Auditor General has recommended a blue ribbon panel of experts be set up by Parliament to review the resource requests of Officers of Parliament. There are some attractive features of that proposal which the committee may wish to take up with the Auditor General. In my view, the best solution will be the one which is simplest and most transparent.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that I come to you in the midst of a crisis of under-funding of my office. The workload of complaints against government far outstrips our ability to give acceptable service. The backlog of incomplete investigations is now at a level which would take all my 23 investigators a full year to dispose of (without, of course, doing any work on new complaints coming in the door). Last year, the average time it took to complete an investigation was some nine months – at least six months longer than is reasonably acceptable. The reason is insufficient resources. Every internal efficiency gain has been exploited. We simply do not have enough investigators to do a labour intensive job. As well, my office has no research, policy, training, public education, or communications staff. These we sacrificed as part of the internal search for resources to put towards investigations. Consequently, my ability to assist this committee, other committees, Parliamentarians and Canadians who seek my help, is every bit as compromised by lack of resources as are my office’s investigative functions.
You heard all this from me during my last appearance, and you heard of my most recent request to Treasury Board for an increase in base funding of some $2 million to put my office back on a sound financial footing. Since my last appearance, Treasury Board Ministers have made their decision and it was to refuse to give even $1 increase to my offices' base funding. To add insult to injury, it approved the hiring of five investigators for 16 months to attack our backlog. Of course a funding commitment of such a short term duration was a recipe for failure. There is simply no possible way to attract investigator-caliber people for such a short term job, and no way to train, security clear and deploy them in such a short time period to effectively tackle a large backlog of cases. As well, by giving no approval for additional, permanent investigators, the government ensured that the incoming workload will continue to overwhelm us and the backlog will continue to grow. This is the reality on the ground of why my independence is being undermined by resource starvation, and why a more independent arrangement is sorely needed.
