The report that is tabled here is now a year old. It only goes up to last March. In that time period -- I started in the beginning of February in 1992, so that was all of the 1992-93 fiscal year plus February and March of the year
before that they were all together -- we opened 187 files. That means that 187 instances occurred where somebody either complained about a situation or asked for information.
Some of those files contained four, five or six different issues. Since that time, we have now decided to give them each a different file number so it is easier for us to keep track of, so of those 187 files, we had more than 250 complaints and inquiries.
In the annual report, in the chapter on complaints and inquiries, chapter five, you will see that it is broken down by general subject area of complaint, but there is a file number listed with each one of those complaints that are reported. You will see that some of them have only one file number. Some of them have up to 10 or 15 file numbers. That means that those 15 files all related to the same subject. So we reported them all together as generally this is what we did on that particular issue, and some of them come up again and again and again so it wasn't worth writing 15 different items with the same complaint.
We are now heading towards 450 files. I think it is 430 as of today, so it just shows the numbers of incidents that occur in our office where people call. They either ask for information, or they raise a complaint about a service not being available or they don't think their rights were upheld - those sorts of things. So we have to investigate all of those.
Sometimes we find that the complaint is not founded. Sometimes the person making the complaint is in error. They misunderstood something or they think something is not available, but they didn't ask the right person, that sort of thing. Some of them are resolved very quickly. Others we find require a specific interpretation of a section of the act and we have to spend quite a bit of time on some of those. Those are the complaints that are quite a bit lengthier in the report.
During the first year, 1992-93, when we were first setting up the office, we went through about three different systems of keeping track of all the complaints and inquiries, cross-referencing everything and tried to find a system that worked well. Finally, towards the end of that year, we found a system that we think is now working quite well. During the first year, we didn't enter all the data about which language or which community the complaints dealt with. But, I can tell you, just off the top of my head, that they come from everywhere. They're not just from Yellowknife, Iqaluit, or Inuvik. They are from all over the place.
This year, now that we've got the computer system set up, we'll go back and enter the language and the community that the complaints came from right from the beginning and for certainly all the new ones we've dealt with this year. We'll try to do it for all the ones before that. That way, we'll be able to provide statistics. I did say in this first annual report that we weren't able to provide statistics because we didn't have all the information put into the computer in the first year. We had to experiment with a couple of different systems so by the time we wrote the annual report, we didn't have all that information compiled for 1992-93.
But, since that time -- as I have said, it is a year later now -- we do have all that in place now and we are able to provide some statistics. We have to calculate them now, based on the information we have in the computer. That will be in the 1993-94 report. I can just tell the Member that, yes, they do come from everywhere. They come from people in government offices, members of the public, native organizations, federal government institutions, universities, many, many different bodies. We try, as much as possible -- if it's not within our jurisdiction or if it is not something we have information about -- to help the person find a solution or find someone to help them resolve the situation or give them the information they need. I hope that answers the Member's question.