Government Operations Committee on May 5th, 2014

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Ms. Day, your time is up.

Mr. Adler, you now have the floor.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Minister, for being here, and thanks to your officials.

As you know, we've been undertaking a study at committee on open data, metadata. One thing we've learned is that you can't just throw data out there; you have to frame it in a way that is comprehensible to people.

Is there any education process that you have undertaken, first of all to show people that data is available, and second, to show them how to use it?

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Perhaps Corinne can add some things, but let me say at the outset that we have absolutely through the CODE experience gotten to various computer science departments and research departments from coast to coast. It was an exciting period for me, because we were able to get to the community that can most manipulate this data and come up with new and innovative things. These are the coders and the designers of mobile apps and those kinds of things. So the word is getting out there.

I would say that on the actual site itself, data.gc.ca, we try to make it easy for people to understand what's going on, what's new, what new things are available, those kinds of things. Some of it is passive; some of it is a question of my going out there as minister, making clear what is available. I think we have to do more. Certainly I think the coding and research community is more aware now than they were a couple of years ago.

In terms of the wider understanding, obviously there's more to do.

Corinne.

[Corinne Charette]

What we have to recall is that open data, data.gc.ca, is a movement that is basically only three years old, with our formal joining of the Open Government Partnership in 2012. We are still, throughout the federal public service and even in the provinces, territories, and municipalities, in a learning mode. We started off in late 2011 with six departments; we're now at 38 departments and have more than 200,000 data sets.

We're learning, both the users of open data, including the academics, the students,and the non-profits who are using this data, and also those of us within the public service. For instance, as part of our preparation for the CODE hackathon, we named in each department an open data coordinator and worked very hard with the coordinators across the major departments, first to identify high-value data sets, and second to bring them together to ensure that those data sets were properly described, so that users coming online to download them could understand what was in each field and could work on the data properly.

What we found in having these workshops—which we regularly do, and now we have a user community of open data coordinators across the federal government—is that we are all learning together and that in fact departments are coming together. As a result of students working on the CODE hackathon and observing how they use the data, we have learnings that we're bringing back and incorporating into our plans to release more data sets in the future to make them more comprehensible to the average Canadian as well as easier to download in the appropriate formats, and so on.

But three years is still very early days. We're very pleased with our progress, but we expect there will be more education to come.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Okay.

I was reading that there are between 20,000 and 50,000 hits a month on the data.gc.ca website. Is there any indication who or what kind of people those 20,000 or 50,000 hits are from, whether they are researchers, students, or people who are just curious?

[Corinne Charette]

We're very preoccupied with maintaining the privacy of our users, so we do not track who comes and downloads; it is anonymous. We get occasional feedback on the site that says, “I'm interested in this data set. Can I have it?” We have their e-mail addresses for the purpose of responding to such e-mail, but in general, we do not track who is accessing what data. It's anonymous.

We suspect it's a lot of academics and students and non-profits and so forth.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Okay.

There is a portal, I see, for comments and suggestions. Those are taken seriously and evaluated on their merits—

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Absolutely.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

—and then, if warranted, that data will be released.

Is that correct?

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Absolutely.

I'll add one more thing about the CODE experience, the appathon, the hackathon. It was really interesting that some of the coders decided not to do an app that was about a thing. They decided to do apps that would help people get better access to the data on the site. That was their focus as part of their app. This is great. It's the kind of thing you want to get from users: how they, in a more intuitive way, can use the site better.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Adler, but your time is up.

Mr. Byrne, I now give you the floor. You have five minutes.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Minister, you opened your discussion with us with a reference to the Heartbleed vulnerability and the impact it had on the federal government and its operations. You indicated that there was a breach of personal data, which the RCMP is now prosecuting as a criminal offence.

Minister, you indicated that Treasury Board is concerned about the Heartbleed bug and suggested that the committee should be concerned about it. You may be aware that there was a motion before this committee to study the Heartbleed vulnerability; I put forward a notice of motion that there be a discussion on that motion.

You will notice that there is no discussion pending on the Heartbleed vulnerability scheduled for this committee. You will also notice that there is a majority of Conservative members who sit on this committee, who direct the activities of the committee. I can't be any more open than that, but I'm sure you can connect the dots.

Since there are no scheduled hearings on the Heartbleed vulnerability by one of the government operations oversight committees that you feel should be concerned about it, could you outline for the committee what departments and agencies and organizations with OpenSSL architecture were shut down while this vulnerability was being investigated? Can you inform the committee whether there are any investigations now under way concerning breaches of personal privacy that may have not yet led to arrest or conviction but are now under way as an investigation?

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

To answer your last question directly, I'm unaware of any further investigations other than the one with CRA that was referenced.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Could you tell us what other departments, agencies, and organizations in the federal government were shut down for a period of time as a result of the vulnerability?

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

All I can tell you off the top of my head is that any website that had OpenSSL, obviously as an inoculation approach to it, was shut down until the patch was ready. We applied the patch, and then we opened it up again.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

You opened your statement with a discussion about this, but you can't inform us of the departments.

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

I don't have that information in front of me. I apologize.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Okay.

Then I'll move to open data, since it does not appear we're going to get too far with that.

You indicated a directive is forthcoming on open data that will require federal departments to participate. That's a positive reinforcement. It implies there is some sort of requirement, some sort of adjudication as to whether or not departments are meeting that requirement. It would imply there's an appeal process for anyone who feels that a department or agency may not be meeting that requirement. Could you elaborate on this further to give us confidence in reply to some of the other questions, when I thought you would have relayed some information about the directive on open data, to ensure that we're getting open data, and it's not being politically gerrymandered.

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Sure. I'll leave it to Corinne to talk about the guts of the process.

The reason for doing it this way is that before, Corinne and I, not to make it personal, but as the CIO and the minister, we're constantly encouraging departments to publish more. Some departments put their shoulder to the wheel and were doing that. For other departments, it just wasn't a priority, or they were up to their eyeballs in alligators or whatever was going on, and they weren't responding to the extent that we thought they should be capable of.

Having the open data by default puts the onus on them. They have to publish unless they can convince in a process that it is a violation of public policy or some other legal requirement.

Corinne.

[Corinne Charette]

Fundamentally, data is collected, aggregated, created by individual programs across government in every department. Larger departments have multiple data sets that they collect and work with as evidenced by the amount we have. We don't yet have an inventory of all the available open data sets that we could wish to publish, so we're working on a policy instrument, a directive on open government, that will require departments to do two things.

The first is to compile an inventory of all the data they collect or aggregate or create by virtue of their individual programs. This is program by program, a data set or an inventory.

Once they have this inventory—and we anticipate that this will take some time, so it's not something that will happen overnight—and a directive is published, departments will have an implementation period to conduct their inventory and report their inventory to us. Then they'll have an implementation period to phase in these additional data sets for publication on the open data portal over the next couple of years. As you may recall from the last time I was here, each time we publish a data set on the open data portal once, it has to be in one of the formats that the open data community is prepared and able to use. Sometimes it requires manipulation. Then it requires descriptions at the metadata level that says what the data set is about, for instance, health information on diabetes, or whatever it is on. Then it has to describe each one of the fields in the data set sufficiently well so that somebody downloading it could repurpose it. This metadata has to be available, of course, in both official languages. Then we have to load it onto the portal.

The directive will allow us to do that.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

I am sorry to interrupt, but your time is up.

I now give the floor to Mr. Aspin. You have five minutes.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Welcome, Minister and officials. Thank you for helping us with our study.

Minister, you're one of the great communicators of the government, so it's not surprising that you show so much enthusiasm for this particular project. I'm just wondering, how would you rank the federal government's initiatives on this open data area? On March 4, we had one of your officials come in and say that Canada had caught up to the United States and the United Kingdom as leaders. Other witnesses suggested we're still catching up, and still other witnesses suggest we aren't even close to those two countries. Could you give us your perspective on how we're doing relative to the other countries, and to the world?

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Thank you. I had no idea that the member was going to start his remarks by such a gratifying description of my abilities.

I think in some areas it's a bit lumpy. In some areas we're ahead or among the leaders, and in other areas we are catching up, but we're catching up quickly. It is one of these things where, because we have the Open Government Partnership now in place with 60 countries, we can start comparing and contrasting. I would say, because we're an advanced industrialized country with an advanced democracy, a number of things we're doing have a degree of sophistication, which I think is commendable. On the other side, when you're dealing with developing countries, their rate of catch-up is accelerating, but they started from a place far behind where we were. That's, I think, the reality of the situation.

When I talk to my counterparts about 200,000 data sets online, they are impressed. They see that as a very impressive total. I'll say this on the record. The United States had a contest where they were trying to encourage more citizen participation in app development. We took it to the next stage with our Canadian open data experience. I think ours was, at the end of the day, a superior process. When we started the process of organizing CODE, my stretch goal was maybe 100 participants. This was a brand new initiative. It was maybe of interest to computer science departments and a couple of other designers, and that kind of thing. To have 900 Canadians, a lot of them young Canadians who are still in school, participate in that project just blew me away. I was very excited about that, and very excited that they were excited about open data from a government perspective. A lot of them came up to me and said, “We had no idea this stuff was available and online”, and it really is getting their creative juices flowing.

That's how I would answer that question. I'm proud of where we are, but I do know that we have to continue to make progress.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Minister, with regard to that, what would you say the government's overall objective is in this area? Would we want to be in the top 10%, the top quartile, or do we want to be the ultimate leader?

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

I think we want to be the leader in open data.

You heard deponents here talk about Canada's next great natural resource. That's a line I've been using in my speeches across the country as well. I really do believe that if we can unlock the value of open data, it does create wealth. It creates knowledge. It creates a more informed citizen. It allows our entrepreneurs to be innovative and productive. Also, by the way, it makes Canadians' lives easier because these apps, when they get put on their mobile device, save time, maybe 5 minutes a day or 15 minutes a day, or help our new Canadians find the right place for them, or whatever it is the app does.

Quite frankly, the benefits are limitless. What I tried to do is engage the public. As I've said, with no offence to my colleagues, bureaucrats thinking of ways to create wealth is fine, but that's not the whole story. We've learned the creativity of the marketplace can really unleash this in a way that will create value for Canadians for years to come.

I really do believe this is the future. If we can be the leader in open data, that helps Canada create jobs and new economic opportunity for the future.