I am encouraged to hear that Access to Information Review Task Force is inviting comments from the public.
A revolution in information technology has taken place since the federal access law came into force in 1983, but a revolution in the mode of government operations would be required in order to achieve a truly open and efficient government.
Thus, I would like to propose a complete reversal of the mindset of the government business, from the tradition of secrecy to open transparency. In this new model, a range of records held by federal departments and agencies, including E-mail messages, internal memos, briefing notes, expense reports and audits, would be inherently visible to the public by default via the Internet.
Since such pieces of information can presently be obtained by the access to information process anyway, there would be little difference in terms of the contents of information eventually disclosed to the public. There would be, however, a great deal of increase in efficiency by the government because it will no longer have to process any requests and to manually search for the relevant information.
The Access to Information Act would essentially have a single paragraph: "Allow on-line public access to every piece of information except for federal cabinet documents, information relating to such areas as national security, advice to government, trade secrets and police investigations." The Office of Information Commissioner of Canada would simply process complaints and resolve disputes instead of handling each and every request. There would be no more request forms and application fees for the public, and no more processing costs for the government.
