Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to take this opportunity, as well, to thank the Information and Privacy Commissioner for the work that she does and for her report.
I want to just highlight a couple of things. Some of them have already been highlighted by the chair in his remarks, but a couple of other things. I want to support Mr. Dolynny’s comment about using the Information and Privacy Commissioner at the front end of the development of legislation. I would recommend, as he does, that the government consult
with
the
Information
and
Privacy
Commissioner at the time that an LP is developed, and certainly at the time that the actual act itself is developed.
There were a couple of things in her report which I want to highlight. One is that the number of complaints that came to the office have… I shouldn’t say the complaints have gone down, the number of organizations that she was dealing with went down. There were also two organizations which proactively notified her office of a breach of privacy, which tells me that we’re becoming a little more aware of information and privacy issues and that
organizations
and
departments
and
governments are recognizing that maybe there has been a breach and are choosing to go to the Commissioner with that issue as opposed to waiting until somebody makes a complaint. I think that’s a good advance.
The other thing that I wanted to highlight is that one of her concerns was that quite a few complaints related to delays in a response, and a request for information took an extremely long time. I think it’s something that we as a government need to address. It kind of goes to the issue of looking at access by design and, I think, as a government, there’s a bit more mindset to make more information available to the public. But certainly, when we get information requests from the public, ve
ry often there’s a very long time period before the
person who has made the request actually gets their answer, and that needs to be fixed. We need to be responding to the public in a fairly short period of time.
We also, I think, have to have a greater mindset with regard to the dissemination of information and making government information available to the public. We’re starting to go there and I think the
Department of Finance, through the office of the chief information officer, are advancing that. We have more and more departments that are providing things online and allowing residents to access things online, but we need to, I think, have a mindset that our first thought is to make information accessible. Not that our first thought is to keep information from the public.
I’m very sorry, I guess, and sad to see that we still do not have any action on access to information and
protection
of
privacy
legislation
for
municipalities. This has been an issue that the Information and Privacy Commissioner has brought up probably almost 10 years in a row now. I believe the government is starting to work on it,
but it’s
something which should have been in place certainly by the end of the 17th Assembly, and we’re
not there yet for sure.
I echo Mr. Dolynny’s thoughts about the workload that’s going to be required with the implementation of the Health Information Act and the fact that the Privacy Commissioner is moving to a full-time position is a good thing. It’s going to be necessary in order to ensure that looking after our health information is done in the right and proper way.
That’s, I think, it. This is, again, a good report. I think I’ve seen a good report every time the Information and Privacy Commissioner has put one forward for us. I guess I look forward to seeing some progress, I hope, on the ATIPP for municipalities in the very near future. Again, I just thank the Commissioner for her work.