Government Operations Committee on April 29th, 2014

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for your questions and answers.

Ms. Ablonczy now has the floor for five minutes.

[Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, gentlemen.

I think it's fair to say that this whole concept of open data is in its infancy to a big degree so we're now working together to try to do this as best as possible. Bearing in mind the great plea that we've heard about consultation and dialogue, I'd like to ask the smartest people in the room—who happen to be our witnesses—what databases or data sets from the point of view of the province or the cities that you represent are of most value to you or do you reckon will be the most valued to you so that we can start to do a reality check on our own priorities?

[Ron McKerlie]

That's a great question. I'd have to give that some more thought. We use a lot of the federal government data now, particularly a lot out of Stats Canada. We use a lot of the place data, the geospatial data, that we've talked about already.

Most of the data we use is very contextual. If we're trying to solve a transit issue, we're looking for anything you know about funding or building transit, for any data you would have on that. If we're looking to roll out electronic health records, we're trying to figure out what Canada Health Infoway and others would have in terms of health information.

So the answer is that it really depends on what problem we're trying to solve at the time. Then we're usually looking for information to help us solve that problem. I'm not sure I could give you much more detail than that, because each ministry has a very different set of issues they're trying to deal with. What would be useful, though, would be to see what data you possess, such as an inventory, so that we could get a sense of what data might be available to us as we're trying to solve problems.

[Robert Giggey]

I can say that at the city level, for sure our most popular right now, although some of this is based on what we have available, are recreation, transit, transportation, garbage collection, cultural events—all of those front-line, immediate services that people are looking for. They are the most popular.

To pick up on a previous question, though, sometimes you can't tell the value of a data set simply by the number of times it's been downloaded. You can have cases where somebody has downloaded the data once, but viewing that data can be thousands of users.

[Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

But what does the City of Ottawa want to see from the feds?

[Robert Giggey]

To go along with that, I think transportation is a key one, as is environment, health, and spending itself. We've had requests to see the spending as it goes through the three levels of government.

Certainly around transportation it's an easy one. Take the conditions of the highways and the roads. There's the City of Ottawa's jurisdiction, for example, and the NCC's. If we're going to look at helping people get around the city, we need the city roads, we need the provincial highways, and we need the NCC, because they have the parkway on the edge of the city. For recreation, it's the same thing. They offer events, they have parks, and they have the Rideau Canal skateway. This is the kind of day-to-day stuff that people want to do.

[Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Does the federal government keep that data? Or would that be provincial?

[Robert Giggey]

In the case of the NCC, I'm not sure, but I think federal highways would be one example in terms of that indication of how you get around.

[Harvey Low]

Given that our major role is to identify in a better way the clients we serve, we need that profile data, that socio-economic data.

If you're asking about what data we need from the federal departments, I could give you a list right now, as follows. We are in very short supply of health data. The federal government is sitting on a gold mine of health data through CIHI, the Canadian Institute for Health Information. That would be a great start. We get very little data from them.

There's also the CMHC housing data. That one is a little different. We would like to get that data at a specific level of geography. There are little nuances to the data.

The big one, of course, is the national census. I realize this is a political hot potato, but I'll say what's on my mind: bring back the long form. We've heard it loud and clear in our community. That is the only substantive source of socio-economic data that's reliable.

Finally, sometimes it's not just about the type of data, it's about the way the data is provided. To give you an example, employment is huge in Toronto. Job creation is huge in Toronto. The labour force survey and all of that data that comes from the feds is only done every five years. We do not get that level of granularity in neighbourhoods, so you need to begin thinking about expanding your delivery and dissemination of data on a more timely basis rather than every five or seven...or 10 years on religion data.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Mr. Lenihan, did you want to add something?

[Don Lenihan]

As somebody who's not part of a government, I would just to defer to my colleagues here. They would have a much more direct view on this than I would.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Mr. Ravignat, you have five minutes.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Just as a quick comment, I hear you, Mr. Low, about the long-form census data. I come from a research background. It's basically a national tragedy that we've lost so much useful data. It's really unfortunate. We've called on this government to reinstate it, but there seems to be some resistance there, for unknown reasons.

I want to come back to two things. One of them is access to information and the relationship between open government and access to information. Unfortunately, there's a lot of frustration with regard to access to information out there, particularly the practices of this government—how the act is being applied, delays, etc. There's a relationship, I think, between reducing the amount of access to information and the accessibility of data. I think if you make useful data open by default, then there's a potential to reduce access to information requests. It could wind up saving taxpayers money, really, and a lot of frustration with regard to journalists, etc., trying to find information.

Just your comments on that relationship between access to information practices and open government would be greatly appreciated.

[Ron McKerlie]

Maybe I can start. Thanks for the question.

All the research we've done suggests that the easier it is for access to information the more demand for information you'll get. We honestly believe that even though we are moving down a path that will both automate the front end of the FOI process to make it easier for people who ask for the information, as well as proactively releasing information before they ask.... We know it's information that people always ask for. Our goal is to try to make information more readily available, to point to it.

The other thing we're trying to do is to use data visualization and information visualization to make it easier to understand once you find it. A lot of the financial information is available through three volumes of public accounts. The problem is nobody can read or understand it. Taking that financial information and visualizing it is the next step for us to try to make it simpler to understand.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

I'm rather impressed with all the efforts that have been made by the provincial government on this concept of open government. There are many things that the federal government could be doing, and there are clear examples at the provincial level where we could probably learn from your experience.

With regard to your understanding of “open by default”, a lot of research exists in the federal government departments that is being done in a transitional way, that's not necessarily complete, not necessarily fully baked, yet, useful. I wondered if you could comment on the default portion and the timeliness of that portion with regard to what the ideal is in making that data available as quickly as possible.

[Ron McKerlie]

We haven't got it approved yet but we're going for 90 days, so the information gets created and it's out within 90 days. That's the goal. We'll see whether that survives cabinet or not but that's what we're offering.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

It's amazing—90 days.

Do I still have some time?

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Yes, but Mr. Lenihan seems to have something to add on that matter.

[Don Lenihan]

I'd like to make a couple of brief comments on “open by default”, which of course is the name of our report, and we had a lot of discussion around that concept or principle.

First of all, to go back to your question about whether more open data would reduce the request for open information, I doubt that, frankly. I think it's about culture and expectations and about how we understand our relationship to government. If it turns out that we start to think that this is public property and should be available and start thinking about how we're going to govern, my guess is that's not going to restrict the number of requests for open information. We're going to expect access to that too.

I want to go one step further and just say this. This is a much longer discussion but we spend a lot of time talking about this with each other in the group and also with the participants in the various sessions. The way we've governed for a long time has been around an assumption that governments retreat. They make decisions and they need to be in private when they make these decisions. Then they announce and they communicate and defend their policies.

We kept hearing from people of all sorts that the more complex it gets out there, the more information technology and communications and other things are out there, the reality is that model simply doesn't work for all kinds of reasons. It doesn't mean it's bad; it served us very well. If the model of policy-making requires a high level of privacy or secrecy that you can no longer control, it puts it at odds with ourselves. I think what we heard a lot of people saying is that the real challenge for politics over the next 10 years is recognizing that you can't make policy that way. I'm not saying any policies but just having a model based on secrecy in the traditional way increasingly will not work, and how you get ahead of it where the principle is not open when we say it's open, it's open by default, may well be the challenge that lies ahead for all of us.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Ravignat. Your speaking time has expired.

Mr. Adler, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all witnesses for being here today.

Mr. McKerlie, we spoke earlier about intergovernmental data coordination. Is this not like negotiating a trade agreement in a multilateral sense? If you're talking with different governments and when you begin to group data, you have to come up with a common set of definitions of what each word means. Is that an issue as you see it right now or a potential issue going forward?

[Ron McKerlie]

Sure. Whenever you're going to spend time trying to agree on language issues for metadata and standards in terms of formats, it's tedious work and it's long and involved. The benefits though, I think, are huge, and they're huge for a very long period of time. I think it would make Canada unique in the world if we had, among our various levels of government, a common set of metadata terms so that people, if they wanted environment data from any level of government, could actually find the environment data they were looking for from any level of government. If we had a single search engine to tie that all together, we would be unique in the world.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

I agree.

Who, in your mind, would create all of that?

[Ron McKerlie]

I think we already have a number of forums that work well.

I used to be the corporate CIO for the Province of Ontario. We have a forum at which the CIOs from Treasury Board as well as from each of the provinces, and so on, get together regularly anyway. Maybe that would be something we could task to that group. We need the municipalities there as well, obviously. Maybe it's an expanded version of that.

But it's technical work.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

It's very technical.