What are our immediate challenges? First, is the need to modernize and strengthen the Access to Information Act. The Minister of Justice is preparing a bill in this regard. I am urging all MPs and Senators to watch out for a "wolf in sheep’s clothing". When it comes to the right of access, what a government sees as reform may appear to citizens as regression. No government, no matter the political affiliation, finds it comfortable being subject to legally enforced openness. I fear that any government reform bill will weaken the rights of access requesters, weaken the oversight powers of the Information Commissioners, add new justifications for secrecy and make the access process slower and more expensive for users. You may count on me and my officials to assist you in your deliberations on a reform bill, when they begin. I have already informed Parliament of my "wish list" for reform in the form of a Special Report, tabled in 2002, in response to the government’s internal task force report on access reform. Copies are available on request or at infocom.gc.ca.

I won’t, in these remarks, repeat my wish list for reform. Rather, I want to stick to the main reason for this meeting, my office’s resources. In this regard, I want to point out that, unless my office is properly resourced, I cannot ensure, on behalf of Parliament and the public, that the government lives up to its openness obligations. As it stands, our resources are entirely inadequate.

Truth be told, we are in a financial crisis. In the last decade, resources have not kept pace with workload. With respect to the investigator group, the office has been unable to replace retiring or departing investigators and has a current investigator complement of 23, which is well below the number of investigators required to complete the forecast annual workload of received complaints. On top of this deficit, there is a growing backlog of incomplete investigations, which is now equivalent to a year’s workload for the office.

With respect to the non-investigator group, the office has seriously depleted its capacity in the past 10 years in order to transfer resources to the investigator group. The office has moved from two assistant commissioners to one deputy commissioner; from an Executive Director of Operations and two directors of investigations to a Director General of Investigations and Reviews and a Director of Operations, and from a Director of Legal Services and Director of Litigation Services to a single Director of Legal Services.

As well, the office had to give up entirely its public affairs, research, education and training capacity in order to put resources towards an increasing workload of investigations.

Despite repeated efforts to convince the Treasury Board to properly fund the full range of the commissioner’s mandate – including several exhaustive reviews by independent consultants, jointly with the Treasury Board Secretariat – emergency and partial funding only has been forthcoming.

This resource crisis was a matter of discussion by the Parliamentary Committee on Government Operations and Estimates and the Parliamentary Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics during the Information Commissioner’s appearances last year. Some members asked whether the inadequacy of resources may be the government’s way of weakening the commissioner’s ability to investigate and expose cases of improper government secrecy. They also wondered if the government is using its authority to grant and withhold resources to undermine the commissioner’s effectiveness and independence.

I did not then, nor do I now, consider it necessary to impute bad faith to make the point that there is a real problem of inadequate funding for the commissioner and that the real result is a weakened ability to do the job Parliament has asked the Information Commissioner to do.

In the Fall of 2004, I again asked Treasury Board ministers for additional funds. The magnitude of increase to base funding my office requires is approximately two million dollars, which represents an increase of some 30%. No base funding increases were approved. Instead, a very small amount of short-term funding was approved, which leaves us no better off in addressing our workload and backlog burdens.

I am also urging government and Parliament to work with all Officers of Parliament to find a new funding mechanism which will be more independent of government. The approach taken by Parliament to the funding of the Ethics Commissioner provides an interesting alternative. In that approach, the Ethics Commissioner proposes a budget to the Speaker of the House of Commons. Once the Speaker is satisfied (likely after review by the Board of Internal Economy), the budget will be forwarded to Treasury Board which will, without change or reduction, be included in the government’s spending estimates and the funding made available to the Ethics Commissioner.

In closing, I wish to remind members that the Access to Information Act delivers tremendous "bang for the buck". The entire system, including departmental processing mechanisms and the Information Commissioner’s office, costs less than one dollar per Canadian per year. I urge this committee to make it a priority to nurture and protect this vital tool for fostering accountability in government.