Government Operations Committee on April 29th, 2014

[Ron McKerlie]

It's grind-it-out difficult work.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Is that possibility on the horizon right now or is it being discussed at least?

[Ron McKerlie]

I'm not aware that it has been discussed. I think everybody understands the need and I think everybody is waiting patiently for a champion.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Okay.

Mr. Lenihan, you mentioned earlier that we'll be making better public policy decisions because we'll have more information at our disposal.

I would tend to agree with that. However—and Mr. Low may also want to come into this—do we not run the risk, first of all, of policy paralysis when we have too much data at our disposal, because the information is just coming out of a fire hose and we don't know when it's going to end and when enough is enough? Also, secondly, I foresee a bigger problem. Because we're relying only on empirical data, do we not lose the fact that for the big policy decisions in Canadian history, like those on national medicare, building a railroad, or these big vision things, no data was available? Those were based on somebody's vision of where they wanted to take our country. Do we not lose that if we rely too much on the information and the empirical evidence?

Could you address those two things?

Then, maybe, Mr. Low, you could chime in too.

[Don Lenihan]

First of all let me just say this. I don't think I said we will be making better decisions; I think I said I hope we will.

I actually agree with what you said. I think we can become overwhelmed by information and data, and that would be a bad thing. Part of what I wanted to emphasize with regard to the importance of open dialogue is that if we don't talk these things through about how we organize the data, how we use it, how we understand it, how we interpret it, then we're at risk of having so much of it with no real coherence to it that we don't know what counts and what doesn't. So part of my argument would be that it's one of the reasons we need dialogue, so we can understand and agree, at least on some levels, as to what it means to say this is about poverty or about financial success or some other thing.

The last thing I want to say is that I absolutely agree with the last thing you said about vision and so on. I don't ever want to live in a world that is run by nothing but scientific policy. I've railed against that all my life.

Here's what I would say. Big policy issues are a complex mix of information, knowledge, and choices. Choices are about values and priorities and lifestyle and all that. I don't want to lose that for a moment.

I think what we don't want to do, on the other hand, is decide that everything is just about priorities and values. It actually isn't. We do know some things about the world, and if we knew things about the environment, about the social environment, about business development, and about a whole range of other issues, those would inform our policy-making.

What I want to argue is that we have a chance to advance policy-making beyond where it ever was. That's not to say it's just about science. It will never be that way.

So I don't think we disagree at all.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

I don't either.

Thank you.

[Harvey Low]

That's a great question.

I totally agree that too much data is confusing.

The real solution to that is not counting, and that's why it's not good as a metric to say your measure of outcome is x number of data sets released. That's not the right metric of outcomes for an open data site.

You can get around this and you can have lots of data out there, but what you need—and Ron touched on this—is a good search engine.

I spoke a bit about needing a better way to tag data sets in terms of issue areas. If you can organize your data that way, it doesn't matter. Look at StatsCan. They have tens of thousands of data sets, but they do it well so you can easily find what you're looking for by either subject area or term or search. I think those are what the government needs to work on—that search engine and that taxonomy—and those will go a long way. Then you can have 10 million data sets out there and it doesn't really matter.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you Mr. Adler. Your speaking time has expired.

Mrs. Day, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Sometimes our governments use data that has been redacted or blackened so that they are not accessible, claiming that they are confidential and that cabinet has decided that they would not be available.

Mr. Low, how can that type of situation be avoided when it comes to open data?

[Harvey Low]

It's a very good question.

The solution to that is already in the works by several ministries. Again, I go back to Stats Canada. I think geography is one of your solutions. When we as a municipality want to better understand the clients who we serve, one way of doing that is to get that aggregated level of socio-economic data. We're not interested in individual profiles of people and how much did they make out there. What we're really interested in is a higher level of geography that makes sense and allows us to do that place-based planning in neighbourhoods. That would be one way around the privacy issue.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Lenihan, my next questions are for you.

We are heading for a communications era where people will have mini computers on their wrists, where they will have everything they need to surf the Internet and access open data at any time. People will know the subway schedules, the weather, etc. That is first-level information for a lot of people. However, if we see something flying by in the sky, we may wonder what is going on and what that is. So now we are talking about space or aerospace. So then that may involve the planets and so on. All of this is unfolding very quickly.

The ordinary citizen may access highly specialized data as well as specific municipal data. For instance, he or she may want to know what day the recycling truck will come by; that is important for people. This will lead them very quickly to provincial data on health and federal data on filing income tax, or geomatics. People will have access to all of this data easily and immediately.

Earlier you talked about forums you had set up that allow people to communicate interactively. How do you assess the data, and the effectiveness of the systems that have been put in place? How is that dialogue with the population carried out?

[Don Lenihan]

That's a great question.

I want to return to this. That is, when we think about the role that dialogue plays in this, and I guess that's what I keep returning to, we do have some emerging models. The example that I gave of the geomatics round table is a really good one because we are going to have to make some fundamental choices that will resonate with citizens, and this goes back to their ownership of it, with citizens and popular use. Ultimately, there are only so many resources and so much effort and opportunity to make things available. As I think you've just rightly indicated, there is already and there's going to be more and more data. So how do we decide and how do we make available the stuff that really matters?

I would turn to models like the round table and say that if we don't learn how to have these discussions we won't be able to make those choices. Those really are policy choices at the end of the day.

I could go into greater detail about how these sorts of discussions will take place. The one thing that I would want to say, and I hope I'm not missing your question, is that there's justified fear among governments, especially at the political level, that in opening up dialogue—even the word is scary—we're sort of giving away all this power to somebody else to make decisions. I don't think that's necessary at all.

If I could make one point about open dialogue, it doesn't mean that government has to give away any authority at all. I think it does mean that government has to change the way that it makes decisions. So if you're part of a collaborative table having a discussion on setting priorities for how we will use our resources together in various ways, if you were there representing the federal government my advice to you if you were the minister would be, you don't ever let anybody tell you what to do. You're not giving your authority over to somebody else to make that decision. What you're doing is sitting there to work with others differently, where we're all trying to reach a collaborative answer that essentially serves the interests around the table of everyone in the best possible way.

My view about open dialogue is that it's not about giving away authority; it's about exercising it differently. That is, openly in a way that we recognize the need that we have to work with others to make choices so we can solve the problems you're talking about. My argument would be that we will never solve those problems in a vacuum because increasingly they involve more and more players.

I hope I haven't missed your question.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

That is fine, except for the assessment of the data; I would like to know how that is done.

However, I think my time has expired.

Is that the case, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Yes, but perhaps you can come back to that later.

I will now yield the floor to Mr. Hillyer for five minutes.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

As much as I've appreciated a lot of the vision and the recommendations on where the federal government can better provide data and make it more accessible to the general public, I think the purpose of the open data project was to put it to the developers and anyone else out there to get in on it so that it's not driven just by the federal government. So while I think a lot of the recommendations are valuable, and we need to consider.... Well, let me put it another way. We shouldn't be abdicating our own responsibility to provide better data just because we have open data. Just because we are inviting developers and other people in on it doesn't mean that we're done having to provide context, as has been put.

But one of the challenges in the context of the open data project is that we don't want the government itself to put too much context in the data for the open data project. Maybe we want to put context in for other things, but with the open data project itself, by putting context on it we're eliminating a whole bunch of ideas that may have come up without providing the context.

That brings me to a question out of Mr. McKerlie's presentation. You said that you wanted to make sure you're pursuing a “quality over quantity” approach. Is that true just for the kind of data that the government wants to provide, or is it true in the open data context? If it is, I wonder why that would be. Why not have quantity now, which can be followed up as we go with quality, so that we don't have to wait for the quality to get people's hands on this stuff? Maybe they can help us provide the quality.

[Ron McKerlie]

We looked around the world, because we were a little late to the game, and found that a lot of jurisdictions were taking a lot of flak because they were just dumping data sets that were easy to dump out there, but weren't really of use to people. That's why we went with the voting tool, so that the public could tell us what's useful to them. So that's the quality, “quality” meaning value to the individuals, the developers, or the community.

We also did it because we have a restriction in terms of how much money we can spend on opening up data sets. “Open by default” means all data will be released, and over time it will all be open. We'll get there. For us this is staging so that we can get the most valuable data sets out first.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Okay.

You say you're late to the game. If you're late, then we're even later. Who else is doing this, and are other federal governments doing it?

[Ron McKerlie]

Yes, the U.S. federal government and a lot of the states, and the U.K. were probably earliest off the mark with the open government initiatives. But there are lots of countries and jurisdictions that have done well. There are now over 400 jurisdictions, national and subnational governments, that are involved and have signed off on the principles of open government. Data is the easiest for a lot of people to start with, so a lot of them have already moved down this path.

In Canada there are lots of good examples. The B.C. government is doing quite well. The City of Edmonton is doing quite well. There are lots of success stories to point to.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Robert, since you're more on the technical side of this, how do we make open data accessible to non-developers? Once the techies get their hands on it, would their apps, whatever applications they come up with, make it no longer open data?

[Robert Giggey]

One way we look at it is always trying to guess what the public wants to see and what they want to do with it. We found—and I know the municipalities are closer tied to the app space—that it's quite typical that when we want to provide a service, an online service or an app, we're trying to guess what the public wants and how they use it.

But the people who are doing something with the data now, they can do a better job because they're surveying, say, a market. So that app developer is not going to create an app unless there are people there who want it and are going to use it, so they're letting the market drive what will be done with the data, and it takes some of the guesswork out.

In some cases we'll be told directly what data people want, or what they want to do with that, and maybe there is a gap. Maybe in some cases there's nobody out there who wants to do anything, but the public is still asking for that or demanding that. Then instead of spending our time, effort, and resources on those things that somebody will create and do something with, we can instead focus on those areas that nobody's picking up and nobody's doing anything with. Whether it's research, community groups, special interest groups, or app developers looking at certain topics, they have kind of a constituency. They have people who are demanding stuff or asking for stuff, and that's why they're creating it, so they're kind of taking some of the guesswork out for us.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you. I'm going to have to stop you here.

This concludes the testimony. Thank you once again for having been with us and for having shared your expertise on this with us. I am sure that this will help the committee to continue its study and later to draft its report.

Before we leave, the members of the committee have some business to consider . Before we do that, I am going to suspend the meeting for a few minutes.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

We will now resume our meeting.

I have a few details to share with you concerning the next meetings, but first of all, as you saw on the agenda, we're going to deal with a notice of motion from Mr. Byrne.

Mr. O'Connor, you have the floor.

[Gordon O'Connor]

Mr. Chair, I would ask that we go in camera if we're talking about motions. They should be in camera.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

A motion has just been introduced asking that we continue our meeting in camera. That motion cannot be debated.