Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 7th, 2011

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

I will now call the meeting to order and welcome everyone.

Colleagues, this meeting is a continuation of the committee's ongoing study into open government, or open data, whatever nomenclature you want to use--or both, as Dr. Bennett has indicated.

We're very pleased to have three witnesses with us today. The first witness is Brian Beamish, assistant commissioner, from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. We're also very pleased to have the city manager from the City of Vancouver, Ms. Penny Ballem, and Mr. Guy Michaud, director, information technology services and chief information officer, City of Ottawa.

On behalf of all committee members, I want to extend to each of you a very warm welcome.

We're going to start with opening comments from each of you, and then we'll have questions from members.

We'll start with you, Monsieur Michaud, for five to ten minutes.

[Guy Michaud, Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa]

Thank you.

I would first like to thank you for inviting me. Today, I want to talk to you about the City of Ottawa's experience with the Open Data program.

The first question to ask ourselves is, what is open data for the City of Ottawa? For us, it was an opportunity to increase transparency, create awareness of the various parts of the organization, and engage our residents in improving our city.

About a year ago, we launched a huge Service Ottawa program. The idea was to improve services to our residents. Using open data was a means for us to tap into a segment of the community that volunteers their own time and creativity to improve the city and its services. So to the City of Ottawa, open data means more than offering data to the public in a machine-readable format.

Why are we doing it? When we look back at the reason for it, I guess we can say we are maximizing the value of the information we have in front of us. We clearly identified six benefits.

First, we are increasing the city-citizen engagement. We are drawing on the ideas and skills of our citizens to use our data to turn it into information benefiting all of us, from a social, cultural, and environmental point of view. We're tapping into Ottawa's large and diverse, highly educated population.

Second, making our data open encourages external involvement and fosters partnership through multiple facets of the community. The citizens of the city have demonstrated a strong dedication to volunteering in the community. In April of last year, I was privileged to attend what they call a hackerfest. At that session there were over 70 software developers willing to develop software for the city free of charge if we provided them with the open data. This is the kind of engagement that we're getting from our citizens.

Another benefit is economic development. We have a launched an Apps4Ottawa contest using our open data. We have received a tremendous number of applications. We have increased information and services to the tourism industry and to software development. It benefits our citizens and fosters entrepreneurship. When we provide our data, it is free of charge to anyone who wants to use it. As a result, they are able to develop an application, and if they are successful in commercializing it, it's good for them. We have also seen an increase in attendance in events put forward by the city and other organizations.

Another benefit is the collaboration and consolidation of the information. The data we provide from the city can be combined with other publicly available social information, so the developer can create unique and innovative ways for the public to use that information. It's also transparent to the residents. It provides the citizens with an insight into the operation of their city and additional clarity about available services. One of the apps that was developed is the park and rec application. You can download it to a smartphone and it will give you a list of all the parks and recreational facilities of the city. Click on any one of them and it shows where they are located and their hours of operation--that kind of information.

Another benefit is that we are reducing risk and costs. What we have seen is the beginning of fewer ATIP requests. Information is readily available for the public to download and use as they see fit. It allowed the interested and passionate in the community to experiment without restriction. They are normally in a government forum. It's also reducing the risk and the cost associated with software development from a city perspective, because it's the community that does the development and not the city.

Another benefit is that it has encouraged innovation. In the time of tight budgets and fiscal constraint, open data provides a creative solution to the delivery of municipal services and information in a cost-effective way. We have been able to tap into the development and graphic design community in a way that we never thought possible before.

So who benefits from open data? Along this journey we asked ourselves this essential question. While there are limitless numbers of groups that can benefit from this open data, we identified four main groups. The first one is the general public. By making our information available, they can make more use of our facilities and our services.

Another group is researchers. They have been able to access this data and provide interpretation of information using cycles that we do not have to produce. And the strangest things can happen. Public servants use our data to do their own work because it is more readily available.

The third group that benefits from open data are developers who enjoy building applications and making the data usable and valuable. At one of the IT subcommittee meetings at city hall, a group of developers came in and said if we gave them the data, they would develop the application free of charge for the city. In our experience, after a year that is exactly what happened. I will come back to that.

Also political activists can use this information. An example that comes to mind is a website from Ottawa called representme.ca. On that website you type in your postal code and it tells you who represents you at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. You have access to the resumés of your representatives, everything they vote on, everything they do in the press, etc. So at least the public is very well informed of what the person is now doing.

What was our journey to open data? It began roughly a year ago when a council motion requested a review of the city policy on data dissemination. The council requested staff to make a recommendation to amend the policy to allow for open access to public data that will benefit the city and citizens.

So we began a series of consultations, first with the staff, the city residents, some of the academics, as well as the software community. In April 2010 council approved a motion to adopt the principle of open government. At that point we began to work with other cities in Canada, including Edmonton, Vancouver, and Toronto, eventually forming what we call the G-4, which I believe you have been briefed on at a previous session. The purpose was to collaborate on an open data framework and enhance our current data initiative and sharing in the area of standards, terms of use, and open data website design.

At the time we launched our website we made 17 data sets available for the public to use as they see fit. We asked the public to tell us which data set they would like us to use, and based on their feedback, we began to make those data sets available. We currently are offering 36 different data sets, including information about elections, roadways, rinks, museums, airports, and parks, just to name a few. What we found is that most of them fall into the category of geospatial information, like GPS, including recreational rinks, museums, pools and fields, event planning, and elections.

The website also served as a launching pad for the Apps4Ottawa contest. We are extremely pleased with the results of our Apps4Ottawa contest. With the community involvement, the awareness and excitement that was generated through the contest, which we believe is the most successful.... We know it's the most successful one in Canada, and I've been told, but haven't been able to validate, that it's probably the most successful one in North America.

There were two parts to our contest. The first encouraged people to develop an application using our open data or any open data available from any government organization. As well there was an area where people could submit ideas. In other words, if you do not have the technical background to develop an app but you have an idea that you think could be good for the residents, you can suggest that idea and somebody else can pick it up and develop the application accordingly. A significant number of the apps that were developed were based on ideas submitted by our residents to other residents.

Media interest remains extremely high as we prepare to announce the winners next week, on February 15. We are now focusing our efforts on sustainment, to support the long-term vision.

In summary, the steps we went through were to strategize on how to plan and create awareness. It is all about strong governance and community engagement. We have engaged the public every step of the way, from day one. We did public consultation on open data. When it came time to place the ads for our contest, we had a public session. They told us what the categories should be and who should be on the judging panel, and, as funny as it may seem, there is nobody technical on the judging panel. It is really for the residents and not a technical showpiece. We engaged the public, as I said, and we also engaged the universities and colleges to foster partnerships with our program.

We involved the media in the committee from day one. We held public consultations. We also participated, as I've said, in events in the city to promote the open data environment.

We executed that and then we showcased our success. We gave an example of the application, and we mitigated the risk. There are always questions about privacy and so on, so we put a group in place to review the data before it is published, to make sure we respect the Privacy Act and other aspects.

In summary, right now we are working on maintaining our partnerships, both with the public and those internal to the city, and we are in the process of integrating open data into our business model. That has become a day-to-day activity for us.

In closing, for us, open data has been exciting and a worthwhile journey for the city. We have realized many social and economic benefits, and we have developed better service for our citizens with minimal investment.

We always need to keep in mind that we are here to serve the public, and the goal of open data is to remove the barriers we have to accessing this information, respecting privacy and sensitivity concerns while facilitating access to this information for us and the community to leverage the data and improve community experience and stimulate economic growth.

At this point, I would like to thank the Honourable Shawn Murphy, committee chair, and the members of the standing committee for inviting us here today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Mr. Michaud.

We're now going to move to Mr. Brian Beamish.

[Brian Beamish, Assistant Commissioner, Access, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

I'd like to start by thanking the standing committee for the opportunity to appear here today and take part in your deliberations on open government.

I'm here to represent my boss, the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian. Dr. Cavoukian, unfortunately, was not able to be here today, but she sends her regards and regrets. Dr. Cavoukian would like to express her thanks as well that the committee thought to invite the Ontario Information and Privacy Commission.

You may be aware that Dr. Cavoukian and the Ontario commission have the responsibility for overseeing Ontario's two access to information laws: the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which applies to provincial organizations, and the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which applies to organizations at the municipal level. These two acts may differ in scope, but at the end of the day they both have the same goals; that is to ensure that citizens have access to information to enable them to participate in public life and the political process, and that public servants and politicians are held accountable for their actions.

My role at the commission is as the assistant commissioner responsible for what we call our tribunal services department. It would be my staff who are responsible for handling access to information appeals when citizens feel that the government has not appropriately responded to their request. I would point out as a matter of interest that unlike the federal Information Commissioner, Dr. Cavoukian has the right to require government organizations to disclose information.

I know you've heard a lot of terms probably over your last few weeks. Guy speaks of open data. Other presenters have talked about open government. The terminology that I use will be coloured by my experience as a member of a tribunal that oversees access to information laws. I may, for example, speak more often about proactive disclosure than you may have heard before. But I think at the end of the day, regardless of terminology, the presenters you're hearing, and my two presenters here today and I, are generally speaking about the same objectives.

I'd like to start, if I could, to just give you a little bit of context and background about the Ontario experience. I think it's difficult to talk about open government if at a minimum there is not a fully functional access to information regime in place. In many ways, that is the bedrock on which the concept of open government and open data can be built.

I think in Ontario we've made some significant strides in that direction over the last few years. Let me give you a couple of examples. Like other access to information acts, the Ontario acts require government organizations to make a decision to an access to information request within 30 days. Back when I joined the commission in the late nineties, the number of requests that were being responded to within that 30-day period was around 48%, which was absolutely unacceptable. However, through the work of our office and some very good work done by provincial public servants, that response right now is on an annual basis over 80%. It's not perfect, but I think it shows a recognition by the government of the importance of an access to information regime.

I can also point out that the scope of our acts has been increased within the last few years. In 2006, universities were brought under the ambit of the Access to Information Act, and legislation was introduced last December that will bring hospitals in Ontario under the act as of January 1, 2012. It's embarrassing to say that Ontario was the last province to make that step, but again, I think it's significant that two major gaps in our legislative landscape have been filled.

One final example of some progress we've made that begins to get into the area of open government is that now in Ontario it's a requirement for government ministers and senior civil servants to proactively disclose their expenses. Those expenses are available on our website. So it's a small step in the direction of proactive disclosure and open government.

We've been dealing with this issue of proactive disclosure and open government for years, since the commission came into effect in the 1980s. We're really in a different world now than we were then. The dissemination of government information is so much easier to do now that we're out of a paper-based world.

Increasingly, I think, governments are recognizing that public sector information is a public resource. I look at something like the Australian task force that you've been referred to, and I think it encapsulates the growing sense among governments when it says that releasing government-held information on “as permissive terms as possible will maximise its economic and social value...and reinforce its contribution to a healthy democracy”. I think that one segment out of the Australian report really sums up a very important issue.

It may go without saying that the concepts of open government and open data have the full support of my commissioner, Dr. Cavoukian, and, I believe, commissioners across the country. I believe you heard last December that there was a resolution passed by federal and provincial information and privacy commissioners in Whitehorse in September that embraced the concept of open government. Certainly, Dr. Cavoukian, as the Ontario commissioner, fully supports those ideas.

You'll be hearing from others, and have already heard from others, about how to put this into action. I thought in the remaining time I have that I would talk to you about a modest program or our modest contribution—we hope—to open government. That is a program that Dr. Cavoukian launched called Access by Design. We see the concept and principles of Access by Design as the next logical progression as governments look towards the disclosure of government-held information and move into the world of open data.

Some of you may know that Dr. Cavoukian is a world-recognized leader in the area of privacy. In that world, she championed what was called Privacy by Design, which has now taken on a very significant role internationally, both in governments and in business when it comes to how to address privacy issues. The basic concept behind Privacy by Design is to embed privacy into the design and operation of information technologies and systems. In other words, it is to address the privacy issues as you're developing a program rather than as an add-on later. We see Access by Design as a flip side of that very same concept. We believe that governments should be taking a more proactive approach to disclosure, but we do recognize that Access by Design embraces much more than simply proactive disclosure. These are the issues of open data and open government that you have been hearing about.

We have, in support of our Access by Design program, developed seven fundamental principles, which I think have been made available by the clerk to you. We hope and we believe that this set of principles will assist in guiding government organizations as they move into the world of open government and in determining what information to make available to the public and how to do that.

I'm not going to go over all seven. I would just like to touch on a couple of them. The first one, not surprisingly, is to be proactive and not reactive. I have already touched on that idea. We understand that although it's important to have a formal access to information regime, it can be slow, it can be cumbersome, and it can be used by some organizations to delay the release of data. It's time now to move beyond that into a proactive stance, in terms of disclosure of information. Really, it's only in those limited instances--for example, where personal privacy may be at issue--that government should be looking to resort to, or to fall back on, a formal access to information regime.

The second concept I wanted to talk to you about was embedding privacy into design. That's number two. We view this as critical.

When governments are designing new data sets or when they're designing new programs, consideration should be given even at the conceptual stage to how access to this information will be facilitated. Rather than approaching access as an issue to be dealt with down the road, perhaps in response to an access to information request, governments should be looking at what information they're collecting, what value that information may have, who may want that information, and how they can effectively make it available to the public. We think that by designing access in at the beginning, the benefits of open government and open data can be experienced.

Here are a couple of other thoughts that I think tie in to some of the comments that Guy made. Number four among our principles was fostering collaboration, and I think it's important. I think Guy outlined very well how, when government makes information available, members of the public, the private sector, the non-government sector, or even other government ministries may take advantage of that information and produce some very valuable products from it.

While I was preparing for these comments last week, I came across an article in The Globe and Mail that I thought captured this idea. It's entitled “Data Bank a one-stop trove of GTA, regional housing stats”. I won't read the whole thing, but it starts by saying:

How many Toronto families are waiting for social housing? How many rental units are available across the city and how much do they cost on average?

In advance of next week’s Greater Toronto Summit, the CivicAction Alliance has unveiled a data bank of housing information for the GTA and surrounding regions, which brings together up-to-date statistics regarding housing, poverty and population trends.

The data are compiled from Statistics Canada information, municipal data and reports from the non-profit and development sectors, and provide a comprehensive picture of housing needs in the City of Toronto as well as the surrounding regions....

I think that's an excellent example of the collaborative spirit that Guy was talking about.

I'll finish my remarks. I just wanted to say that I'm very familiar with the work that Guy is doing at the City of Ottawa. I believe last week you heard from Dave Wallace from the City of Toronto. They're doing tremendous things in this area. I would encourage you to spend 15 or 20 minutes on their websites. You might be surprised at the type of information that's available.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Mr. Beamish.

We're now going to hear from Penny Ballem, the manager of the City of Vancouver.

[Penny Ballem, City Manager, City of Vancouver]

Thank you for inviting me to appear before you.

It's a privilege and a pleasure to be here today to present Vancouver's experience with open data. As you've heard from our two other speakers today, we embarked on this very important initiative with a view to collaborating with sister and brother municipal governments so that we could take advantage of our shared learnings and move the curve and the agenda of change for us as quickly as possible.

I think what's very clear about success in this particular area is that you need political direction and leadership. In May 2009, our council endorsed the principles of open and accessible data with a very complicated motion, about half of which I didn't really understand. They talked about cadastral data and all this, and most of us were staring at each other. In fact, the essence was that the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, business, and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible, while respecting privacy and security concerns. At the end, it was that summarizing statement that gave the direction to staff: get on with this, do it properly, and we're behind you and will support you.

We launched our open data website in September 2009, which was six months after the council motion. I remember the day that council passed this motion. As the city manager, I went out into the lobby outside the council chambers to meet with my staff and talk to them very briefly and give them some direction. I could see that we had our information and our IT staff and some of our senior management all just staring at me asking what this actually meant.

I'll come back to that, because I think the dynamics of getting going on this are very important to understand. Your support and clarity around the intention of this, as our elected officials in government, really makes a difference as to whether action ensues.

We started with 75 data sets—this was information that actually was available on our website, if you had a couple of years to look for it—and basically a sort of divining rod that could take you to it. We have thousands of pages of information on our current website. We're in the process of significantly revamping our website and making it, with a very significant investment, much more user-friendly. But our first step was to take public data that really wasn't found or used by the public and make it user-friendly and actually available.

Today, in February 2011, we have 126 different data sets from our city currently available. Those range from data on our engineering assets to parks and community information, school boundaries, zoning districts and labels, traffic counts, where all traffic signals are, bikeways, rapid transit information, business licences, garbage schedules, recycling schedules. Really, what we did was start with things that were relatively easy, which we knew from our 311 data the public would be very interested in.

That's another piece of advice: start where there's going to be receptivity and interest. Don't start with your most polarized, politicizing data and expect it to go quickly. I think staff understand that and will move.

Since September 2009, we've had 45,000 individual downloads of data sets. That gives you a bit of an idea of the volume. Unlike the City of Ottawa, which is well out ahead of us in terms of public consultation, our consultation was more strategically focused on the community that had been working with our elected officials to say, “Do this; it's the right thing to do”. It's the developer community, the information community, some of our academic colleagues. We're a little bit behind the eight ball now, basically embracing our broad public and community in helping them understand how to use this.

We have about 425 visits per day to our open data website. Given the fact that a lot of the data we have on the website is technical, I think this is just a measure of the interest, and that's prior to having a full and extensive public engagement process.

The favourite data downloads of the people who are using our website in the 200,000 visits we've had since we started are of property information. As Monsieur Michaud indicated on the geospatial data, they're very interested in that. On infrastructure data, we have a lot of our development community and our professional community looking for our infrastructure data.

This was one of the places where we had long conversations with our engineering colleagues, who were very concerned about whether the data integrity was sufficient and what risks there were for them to put the data that they use every day out into the public arena. They were...I think “shy” is an interesting word, but they were very nervous that the data wasn't up to date enough and would lead to difficulties.

But at the end of the day, what's very, very clear is that our professional community, our public, and our academic community welcome this, and they understand that the data may not be perfect. You can adequately provide them a measure of the quality of the data as we best understand it. What is happening, as Guy has said, is that they are giving us feedback and helping us improve the data on a much steeper curve and in a much more rapid turnover than would have happened if we had continued managing it just ourselves.

Garbage collection schedules are the most common phone call we receive from our 311 platform. It is one of the most popular downloads, which tells you something. There's not anything very difficult about publishing a garbage collection schedule. Our citizens want it. It seems so simplistic to have not gotten to that earlier.

As we set up our open data catalogue, we had a number of things that we wanted to ensure were an integral part of our first phase of this. The first thing was to provide some tools to assist the user community to use the data correctly or in the best way possible. I'll come back to that.

The other thing, as you've heard, was for us to collaborate with our partners and, in this case, across municipal governments. I think when you're collaborating with partners who share the challenges that you do, it helps you get over them. It's easier to move ahead as a group than on your own.

We asked for feedback on the data: its usability, its friendliness, and obviously what kinds of data sets our users wanted. We also asked our citizens what data they wanted to see next. We gave updates. We made sure, as people revisited the website, that they understood what was new and what had been added. We have worked hard to connect with our wider data community and with the broad array of partners who have a tremendous interest in all of this data.

I think it's fair to say that we've bitten off the low-hanging fruit. Now the challenge is how to keep going. You can look at my little graph. It shows you that our first curve was quite steep. It's still growing now, but it's flatter. I think one of our most important exercises now is to look at what's keeping us from steepening that curve again. Is it the complexity of the data? Is it the difficulty in ensuring that it can be presented in a user-friendly fashion? That's some of what we're working with, both within our own organization and with other municipal governments.

FOI, as you've heard, is an important part of open government and sharing of data. Interestingly, as a general manager...and I've worked in the past as a deputy minister in the province. For those of us at that level of government, at the interface of our elected officials and our bureaucracy, a big part of our job is managing the sharing of information and the strategic advantages, opportunities, and risks with that--and how to do it properly. I would say that FOI is always a very huge opportunity for us, but as you've heard, learning how to manage it more proactively is a challenge that I think many of us could use some help with.

Having looked at our FOI requests, the things that we believe are suitable right away for open data include financial information. We currently share PDF versions of our budgets and all of our financial reports. There's a huge amount of financial information that, on a regular basis, is published and discussed in open council at the municipal level. But we don't provide a lot of detailed breakdowns on an ongoing basis by department or project.

A big area of interest is expense claims of elected officials. Our council has pledged to have those published as they happen, on a quarterly basis.

Regarding the list of contracts between the city and third parties, we publish annually, under our provincial statute, that kind of financial information--but it's once a year. We are now starting to publish quarterly reports of contracts that are procured and issued by the city, and a metric of whether they are procured openly or are sole-sourced, and if so, why. Just the notion that we will be publishing that and the work we've done on procurement in preparation for it has reduced our sole-sourcing of contracts to 2% of all our large competitive contracts.

Dog impound data, interestingly, is a huge source of interest to our public. I have no explanation for that, but we'll be publishing it.

There are our 311 statistics, which are basically all of the data on the people phoning in to our 311 platform and asking questions. Of course, when you start to publish that, it actually makes your organization a lot smarter, because they realize if you're going to publish what citizens are asking, then the next question will be on what we are doing about it.

I can't emphasize...and you've heard a lot from Mr. Michaud about the advantages and what we've learned through this initiative. I think we have learned all the same things, but one of the things for me as the city manager is that this openness around our data makes our organization work much better, and we're more proactive; we think it through. The normalization of the notion that all of what you're doing and all the data that you are collecting will be made public and that's just normal business really ramps up the rigour, the analysis, and the thoughtfulness of the work that we do as public servants.

We have many different requests from our public. Just to give you some examples, they're very interested in community centre data, all of the parks and recreation data. They want data from our cemeteries, cemetery records. I assume these are people doing genealogical research and interested in that...and the Vancouver Public Library.

So we have a long list of things that we plan to release.

One of the ways we've looked at it, which is of assistance to us in terms of the feasibility, is on a risk matrix, where we look at data in terms of its cost and complexity to publish, and then look at it in terms of the public value. When you map your data in that way it actually starts to make it easier to understand how quickly you can make it available and what the end result is going to be.

We've had commercial applications done, which I think you've heard about from previous speakers at this committee. We have academic research. How global warming will transform Vancouver's shoreline is the product of our open data. We have citizens reporting disabled parking abuse through one of the apps that's been developed. I think you know that Vancouver is the centre of online games, and we have a game that's been created called TaxiCity, which was developed by Vancouverites who built the game with our data and are selling it as an entrepreneurial undertaking.

Finally, in regard to the benefits we have found, this whole initiative does transform your relationship with community. It builds trust. It allows you to engage with your community in a completely different way, and it's very empowering to our public and our partners. It enhances the return on investments in data--collecting data and keeping it. Ensuring that it's quality data does cost money, and if you're able to share it and get all of the corollary benefits, it's hugely beneficial. There's economic development, transformation, and value for money in the public sector, because we are learning quite quickly about where citizen self-service could actually be initiated through the kinds of things citizens want. And I think it's building partnerships with other governments, which is very effective.

I'm going to stop there and just say that in the next year we're going to be developing simple tools for our citizens. We hope to develop and see a common website; our G-4 group is looking at developing a common website and sharing that with other government and crown agencies. We want to build open data principles into all of our work and normalize it and therefore steepen the curve of change.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for giving me the opportunity to appear before your committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Ms. Ballem.

I want to thank all three for three excellent presentations that will be very helpful to this committee on this issue. You're very out front in this emerging issue, and certainly you and your organizations and entities are all to be congratulated.

We're going to start with the first round for seven minutes.

Dr. Bennett, for seven minutes.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Thank you. That was great.

As other levels of government, you must have some observations on the status of the federal government at the present time in that you need some of their data as well in order to do your work. We were concerned when Government Information Quarterly had us as the leader in access to information laws and recently put us dead last in parliamentary democracies.

If you were writing our report, what would be the recommendations that you would want in this report in terms of how the federal government can catch up? It seems from what I think we've heard that a lot of it is attitudinal. If the leader says, “Thou shalt be open”, as Obama did, then things tend to happen. Obviously, there is a legislative framework as well that actually makes it not optional.

I would like you to tell us what you think needs to happen and where the problems are from your point of view in terms of federal access in terms of open government and open data.

Also, Mr. Michaud, obviously you have the same challenge we do in terms of the two official languages. How have you sorted that out? I think we heard from Toronto that they have lots of things in 70 languages, but the federal official language legislation means that we need to be hard markers on this.

[Guy Michaud]

I'm going to answer first.

There were two parts to your question, and I will start with the part on how we dealt with the official languages. We did not. What happened is that most of the data we produced was geospatial data. We never got, to my knowledge, a request to get this information translated. It is what it is. We give it in the language in which it was entered, and that's it. We have never received any request to get that information translated. That's the first aspect. I hope I answered your question.

The other part of your question was what recommendation we would give to the federal government. I'm not trying to give some advice, but I think we should stop talking about it and just do it. I mean, give the support to the various departments to make the data available. They are smart guys. I used to be with the feds. There are a lot of smart people there. I believe they know what they are doing. Start with knowing your data. Start with data that will not raise any concerns, such as positions of buildings, parks, etc., and see what happens.

At some point in time, you have to take a leap of faith. I will talk to you about my own personal experience. I was the new CIO when my team put forward the idea and the motion. After discussion, I said, “Let's do this.” It has been very beneficial to the city and its residents.

My recommendation is to just do it. Based on feedback that I received from representatives of various departments, people are very anxious to start. They want to do it.

[Dr. Penny Ballem]

I would like to emphasize the same approach. Start simple. Have your departments bring forward their suggestions. It isn't rocket science. I think that the benefit in terms of the capacity of the public to understand some of the complexities of public policy is enhanced when they actually have the ability to see the data.

We engage in very difficult discussions on a regular basis on different public policy issues. When the data is out there, and it's the best data that we have available, and it comes together with data from other levels of government, then you have half the story available and transparent. Then you can get on to the difficult solutions and not spend your whole time trying to educate people. I really believe it steepens the curve of good public policy implementation and solving the problems that we face as all levels of government and the public sector.

[Brian Beamish]

Maybe I could also comment. We're lucky. At our office we have both the provincial and municipal levels, so we have a little flavour of both. I think at the provincial level in Ontario there has been an admirable attempt and a lot of effort made to strengthen the formal process. I gave you some examples, and there are lots of those.

I think what this will now take is to say that's the formal process but that's not the default position. Government disclosure of information doesn't have to rely on an access to information request. In fact, that should be the exception. But I think that's coming.

I think it's interesting that the examples of governments that are doing this well in Canada tend to be at the municipal level. I don't know why that is. Whether they are more nimble and they can turn things around...I don't know. Maybe it's the type of information they make available. I don't know that the mayor of Toronto knew what he was doing when he said we're committed to open government, but his staff went with it and they have done some remarkable things.

As both of my colleagues have said, let staff loose and let them get at this and get the job done.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Dr. Bennett.

We're now going to move to Madame Freeman.

You have seven minutes.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

Thank you.

I first want to thank you for your presentations, which were extremely interesting. I am going to ask a question that is very important to me.

In Ontario, Dr. Cavoukian launched the Access by Design program. You consolidated the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act. So, you must take into account provisions on privacy at the outset of any process. This is what has been brought to our attention regarding your access to information approach. I would like you to explain to us how you operate. I think that this approach has also been implemented in companies you work with in Ontario, such as Hydro One.

I would like to know what exactly you are doing in the cities of Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa to protect privacy when disclosing personal information. In addition, I will ask all of you a question to which no clear answer has been given so far.

I would like to know how you process information requests in French. You said that you provide geospatial, environmental and weather data, which is relatively straightforward. However, there must be some cases with much more complex information involving activities like downloading. How do you provide information when a request is submitted in French?

I would like to ask Mr. Beamish a question.

With regard to the Access to Information Act, you used to process only 40% of requests within 30 days. However, you have succeeded in increasing that rate to 80%. I would like to know how you achieved that. It could inspire many people at the federal level.

[Brian Beamish]

Maybe I'll start with the last question first. There were a number of steps that were taken to increase that response rate. I think the key was to bring it to the attention of senior government officials and ministers that their response rate was unacceptable. So we did a number of things. In our annual report, I mentioned that we started reporting, on a ministry by ministry basis, what their response rates were. That attracted a fair amount of media attention each year, as it was reported that a particular ministry may have had a 20% response rate.

Also, we worked with the government to include in deputy ministers' employment contracts a responsibility to improve the access to information regime. That brought it to senior management's attention. It became something that deputy ministers are measured on. That message quickly made it through to people reporting to them, that this access to information was no longer a nuisance; it was part of everybody's job and couldn't be put off until there was time to do it.

You mentioned how we protect personal information. Did I get that right, from the translation?

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

I read about Ms. Cavoukian's approach, which broadly consolidates the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act. Regarding proactive disclosure, she said that the Privacy Act must be applied from the outset instead of later on in the process. I find this approach extremely dynamic and interesting. I would like to know more about it.

[Brian Beamish]

When it comes to addressing access and privacy issues, in many ways they're different sides of the same coin.

What we've said on the privacy side is that as governments are establishing programs that may collect or use citizens' personal information, even at the very conceptual stage they need to start asking the right questions--i.e., how can we protect the privacy and confidentiality and security of this information?

We're suggesting that the same approach be taken on the access side. In other words, as a government ministry establishes a program or is embarking on an exercise that will be creating or collecting data, we're suggesting that they ask those same questions: what are we collecting, and should we be making this public? Sometimes I'm not sure those questions are asked at the outset of a program. What are we collecting, and what should we be making public? Build into the system an access system right from the start.

If those approaches are taken, I think concerns about personal information will also be addressed.

[Dr. Penny Ballem]

Just to build on that, when I spoke about normalizing the use of open data, you're starting off with an assumption that as much as possible it will be public. So you do have to then structure it so that you know, first, what level of data can be shared that will not permit anyone to be personally identified through that data; and secondly, you build in the vehicles and the levers to allow you to share it easily and readily.

I think it's fair to say that up until very recently, most bureaucracies--the ones I've worked in--have never really thought, “Okay, if we're going to build a data set, how are we going to make it public?” That's usually the last thing they actually think about. I think we're now going through a transformation where, quite quickly, that is starting to become the norm. Therefore, as I said earlier, it makes us do better work. You think about it differently, and you set it up differently. Then you don't face the barriers as you try to move to make it public.

The protection of personal information, or the collection of different metrics that could allow you, with some accuracy, to probably predict who a person was, is critically important, but I think with some thought and proper planning at the beginning you can absolutely safeguard.

One of the things that is very important is a good relationship with your local office of your privacy commissioner. Certainly in British Columbia, as a city manager or a deputy minister, having a good relationship with the commissioner of privacy is fundamental to your ability to safeguard the public interest, to do a good job, and to be successful.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Mrs. Freeman.

Mr. Siksay, seven minutes.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to thank all the witnesses for their testimony today. We almost got to real testimony from Mr. Michaud there. I thought he was going to get all evangelical on us. He did a little bit, actually.

Dr. Ballem, I want to come back to something you said earlier. I understand how we've seen some new applications that are interesting. Some are fun and some are very practical. I'm getting that side of things. But you mentioned that you saw a role for open data in improving public understanding of key issues, and that when data was shared it often moved the discussion to solutions faster.

I wonder if there's an example in something that you've seen at the City of Vancouver where it actually happened, and that might then help us appreciate how that changed the kind of discourse that happened between council and the public.

[Dr. Penny Ballem]

Well, I can give you a couple of examples.

A very brief one is that we had an app that was developed, called VanTrash. Anybody in the public could dial up and find out when their trash and recycling were going to be collected.

What that did—and I think Monsieur Michaud mentioned it—was that our own staff on the 311 line and in the sanitation department actually started to realize that their schedules and how they did their work were now being analyzed and critiqued by the public. So they're taking quite a different attitude to how they set up their schedules. And our 311 staff are using that app immediately so they can turn a citizen's call around much more quickly.

On a more complex agenda, we recently reported back to council on our housing and homelessness agenda, which is a very high-priority issue for our mayor and council. It's a very difficult problem in Vancouver. It's nothing new. It's been going on for a long time, but we have a council and a mayor who really want to steepen the curve of making some positive change.

We spent many months developing a presentation to them that had a lot of data in it and that collected data that wasn't normally brought into that discussion. We haven't put it on the website in an open data form—in other words, that people could go in and analyze. But we just took the simple step of taking that PowerPoint that told the comprehensive story in about 60 slides and making it available to the media and putting it on our website. It's amazing the response from so many different partners and agencies and even individual citizens. And the media have come back to us to said, “Wow, I understand this whole issue much better than I did yesterday before I went through it.”

And it's not a terribly high-tech way to do business, but I think we're learning that telling the story and using good data and the best data that you have and then being able to share that—particularly if people can go in and analyze your data once you get your data sets—is very powerful and everybody gets smarter, and I believe we'll move faster.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I was interested as well when you mentioned that putting the contracts quarterly has increased competition and reduced sole-sourcing. Could you say a bit more about that and the kind of change that's happened there?

[Dr. Penny Ballem]

We embarked on a sort of operational review in the city two years ago to try to meet some significant budget constraints and to keep taxes down, which is a very popular thing to do nowadays. One of the things we realized is that we did not have good control over our procurement processes. So we revamped our policy, and council asked us to share, on a quarterly basis, our results for procurement. As I said, we reported it once a year under the statute. It's very different when you're reporting it quarterly and it's all in a list and you start to see who you're contracting with, the value of the contract, whether it was competitively procured, when it started, and when it finished. And people can start on real time to analyze that. I'll tell you, it's a really good driver to keep your procurement processes very healthy and with a very high integrity, because it's very transparent.

We've compared our data from the last few years, and we're achieving a 98% competitive procurement level on all of our contracts over $300,000. I think that's a metric that is certainly up there as a benchmark, and we're very proud of it. But if you don't publish these things and advertise them, then sometimes you don't even know what the answer to that question is.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Dr. Ballem and Mr. Michaud, you both mentioned that you have people working now on the complexity of data and trying to make decisions about that, about how to present it, and about dealing with privacy questions about that.

Have you needed to reorganize the workforce in some way? Have you needed to hire new people to do that kind of work? Have the public servants who work for the city required new training to be able to do that work to make those kinds of decisions? Has that changed the workforce or expanded the workforce in any way?

[Guy Michaud]

There was no reorganization, no additional staff. If you live in Ottawa, you know that we have some fiscal realities we need to deal with. We did all of this using current staff.

We first engaged the city departments. We have a representative who works with us to make sure we know the data, making sure what the content of it is and what could be made available.

We also have a very strong relationship with the city clerk's office to look into the privacy impact and to get a legal opinion before we make the information available.

So for us there was no increase in staff. Actually, yes, there was an increase in workload at the beginning, but our approach was to try to make it part of the normal process. What we have begun to see in some cases is an increase in the number of requests for information because it's readily available. It had quite the opposite effect. There is always a bump at the beginning, but in the long run we're probably going to be able to have less staff.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Dr. Ballem.