Evidence of meeting #40 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was make.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
4:20 p.m.
As an Individual
Yes. So copyright would be one form of restriction that might apply to a data set.
4:20 p.m.
As an Individual
That's what makes the Americans so interesting. There's no licence, at least at the federal level, for that data. It is in the public domain.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
Okay.
Does that absence of copyright apply to foreigners, or does it just apply to American citizens?
4:25 p.m.
As an Individual
Yes. Anybody in the world can go to Data.gov and download a data set.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
I would just go back to the first two rules: indexation, spidering—if I'm inventing a word—and machine readability. Can you give us a tangible idea of what this would provide for the average Canadian who doesn't spend a lot of time on this? In a very tangible sense they sit down at their computer, they want to know something about the way the government operates, spends money, allocates resources, etc. Tell that person how your vision would allow them to do that. Would they start by going to a website, then type a search term in a box, and hit “Enter”? If you don't mind, give a very clear, simplistic version of how this would affect the daily life of a consumer of information interested in looking into the Government of Canada.
4:25 p.m.
As an Individual
I want to be clear. I don't think that if we start sharing information tomorrow, millions of Canadians are going to show up and start downloading this data. I actually think that would be a terrible metric to use.
The way we need to measure this isn't by the number of people who downloaded a given data set, but by the economic value and by the democratic engagement that it spurs. You might only have a single person who downloads the data set but does something quite interesting with it.
With VanTrash, the example I talked earlier about, the garbage reminder service, the only people who ever downloaded the data set from the city were Luke Closs and Kevin Jones. It was one download, but they created a service that 3,000 people now use and that they derive regular and daily benefit from, because they no longer forget to take the garbage out.
In the U.K., people have taken the budget data and have made it presentable in all sorts of different ways so that people can now look at their budget and understand it for the first time. So you have tens of thousands, if not millions, of Britons who are showing up and looking at their government's budget and understanding how it works for the very first time.
So again, there might have only been a single download, but you have an enormous increase in the number of people who engage and understand how the government works.
There is, however, a longer-term piece that I want you to think about. While today the number of people who will actually download and use this data directly is relatively small, they will have a much, much larger audience. We're entering a world where data and information and computers are becoming central to our lives, and more and more people are going to become literate in using and understanding data and in writing software. The example I always use is that we didn't build libraries after everybody learned how to read. We didn't wait until the whole world could read and then we built a library and said “Come and read”. No, we built libraries before 90% of the people in the world knew how to read. We built them because we knew that we had to provide material so people could learn how to read.
Nothing would make me more excited than for there to be a Canadian data portal so that high school students, university students, graduate students, and ordinary citizens would have data sets about their country, about who they are, about their own narratives, that they can use to learn how to become more computer literate and how to become more data literate. This is, I think, the library of the 21st century that we need to be building.
4:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you very much, Mr. Poilievre.
We're now going to start the second round, five minutes each.
Mr. McCallum.
January 31st, 2011 / 4:25 p.m.
Liberal
John McCallum Liberal Markham—Unionville, ON
Thank you.
As an economist, I find this very interesting. As a politician, there's a certain political element that I'd like to ask you about, which I don't think we've really discussed very much, because in an important sense, information is power, and there are lots of kinds of information that governments in general and this government in particular don't want others to get hold of. To give you two examples, the parliamentary budget officer has had a running battle with the Department of Finance for several years, and the government tries to deprive him of information. Under your system, he could get it instantly with a flick of a switch, and the government might not like that. Here's a second example. The opposition accused the government in its infrastructure program of favouring Conservative-held or minister-held ridings. The government denied it. If all the information were freely available instantly, we could click on the switch and prove it, if it were true.
We tend to think this government is particularly secretive, but every government will have some information it would rather keep to itself and not share. So I guess my question to you is how you overcame this issue. How did Australia and the U.K., both of which seem to have made major strides in providing much more open information, overcome this kind of political impediment?
4:30 p.m.
As an Individual
Sorry, I can't speak to Australia because I haven't seen as much of what they've done with the open data, but I was in London at the announcement when the British government announced that it was going to release all spending data. Again, this is not budget. This is actual spending data, down to the 25,000-pound level.
4:30 p.m.
As an Individual
So any bill any ministry ever paid over 25,000 pounds was going to be made available to the public.
4:30 p.m.
As an Individual
Not geographically. But you can take that data and look at where that money is being spent, because you see the bills, so you can see where the post office is, and things like that, and you can begin to digest geographically where it ends up.
I remember a Conservative minister stood up and said, “I know that people are going to find things out that we're not happy about, and I also know that it's going to make us better”. That was about it. I'm not trying to pretend that there wasn't.... There was enormous political will. I think the British have the advantage of being in a budget situation where they know they need all the help they can get, so they're willing to try to do something that I think is very innovative in order to try to save themselves hundreds of millions of pounds.
I agree that every government's going to have some incentives to not share information. My hope is that when governments choose not to share this information--forget about the parliamentary budget officer--with ordinary Canadians, they are in fact disrespecting our right to access what our government does. I'm not trying to say that past governments or this government are doing this on purpose. I think what has happened is that things have changed. The technology now exists for us to do radically more, and our governments need to adapt and they need to figure out that the end user of this data is no longer a journalist, no longer a researcher; it's the ordinary citizen.
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
John McCallum Liberal Markham—Unionville, ON
So are you saying that we have to call on this government's better nature or sense of altruism?
4:30 p.m.
As an Individual
I do think we need to call on its better nature, but I think we also need to call on its desire for fiscal responsibility, its desire for economic development, and its desire for democratic engagement.
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
John McCallum Liberal Markham—Unionville, ON
On the economic side, Carolyn Bennett mentioned the number six billion to eight billion pounds of benefit in the U.K. Is that correct? What is the nature of that number? If it's that many pounds for the U.K., it might be that many dollars for Canada.
4:30 p.m.
As an Individual
Yes. I think that number was generated.... I won't say I'm intimately familiar with the methodology that produced that survey, but I believe that was a kind of combination of improved efficiencies within government and new businesses and efficiencies that would be created in the private sector because of better access to data.