Good morning, Mr. Chair, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to present Citizenship and Immigration Canada's (CIC) participation in the open data portal.
As many of you might know already, CIC's data differ somewhat from much of the other data available on the Government of Canada's open data portal, due to the nature of our work. Using our data, we produce statistics, be they on permanent and temporary residents coming to Canada, grants of citizenship to new Canadians, or the processing of those applications. The personal nature of this information makes our data sets popular but also limits the amount and type of data we may make available. We take seriously our responsibilities to protect personal information and ensure the appropriate treatment of information. For example, the department aggregates our data to protect personal information, which I will speak about in a few minutes.
Based on the requests for CIC data that we received before we even began to post them on the open data site, and from current requests, we gather that parties interested in our data typically include prospective permanent or temporary residents, immigration consultants, lawyers, researchers, interest groups, corporations, members of the media, other federal departments, and provincial and municipal governments.
Treasury Board statistics show that while more than half of the clients downloading our data sets reside in Canada, a large number also are from abroad, with many of them in India, the United States, Pakistan, China, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. Given that our most popular data sets relate to permanent resident applications processed abroad, processing times, and permanent resident overseas inventories, we expect that many of our overseas clients are persons who have applied to come to Canada as immigrants or who are considering doing so.
The CIC data sets that are part of the open data initiative were originally released by the department on October 1, 2009, before the initiative was launched. These files, all part of CIC's Quarterly Administrative Data Release on CIC's own website, were disseminated at that time through an interactive interface that was published on a DVD and distributed via courier to anyone who requested one.
However, in light of and thanks to Canada's action plan initiative on open government to help the public find, download, and use Government of Canada data, our data sets are now made available on the open data site—www.data.gc.ca—as of July 1, 2011. We were one of the initial departments that participated in the pilot before even the launch of the open data site.
Currently, CIC has 37 tables on the open data site. These tables provide information about CIC's operations overseas and in Canada, the number of permanent and temporary residents admitted to Canada, and data also related to grants of citizenship to new Canadians. All data sets are made available as Microsoft Excel files, a common format, as you might know, useful for a large number of potential users and consistent with past updates. Thirty of the 37 data sets—very recently we were able to do this—are also being made available in machine-readable format, as comma-separated values, CSV, in order to offer users a version of the data that can be more easily incorporated into other applications. This CSV format, I understand, increases the interoperability of CIC's data sets.
The 37 data sets selected and posted by CIC are a mixture of tables that provide to Canadians and other people in other countries a broad background for the work CIC does and data on the number of temporary and permanent residents coming to Canada. These tables are a mix of those that are commonly requested of us by the public and those that we believe provide a useful overview of the work of the department.
Most ad hoc requests for CIC data are subject to the cost recovery requirements set out in section 314 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations. Other requests for data are received through the ATIP process. These are outside of the open data concept. By regularly updating and posting popular data sets on the open data site, CIC enables public access to these data easily, quickly, and at no charge.
Since CIC began making available its data sets on the open data portal, our data have been consistently among the most accessed on the site. This past March, five out of the top 10 data sets downloaded from the open data portal, and eight of the top 15, were from CIC. Of particular interest to the public were data sets on permanent resident application processing, in which we provide data on the number of applications approved and refused, and the processing times, etc.
The limitations l referred to earlier come from the personal nature, as you might have understood, of much of the data we make available. Of primary concern to us is that we protect people's privacy. While the data are ultimately derived from personal information from client applications, we only report aggregate numbers. Our challenge mainly is to make this data available in a manner that's as useful as possible, while also not releasing any information that can identify an individual.
As part of the Government of Canada's open data community, CIC representatives, namely, members of my team, regularly take part in open data working group meetings organized by our colleagues at the Treasury Board Secretariat, where we work with a number of other government departments to improve open data's visibility and usefulness.
The hackathon was mentioned already. We did participate very actively as well in that event, which I take as only the beginning of such events, with many more to come.
We see the open data initiative, to conclude, as being beneficial to the government, to Canadians, and to people around the world. For CIC, it allows us to distribute our data sets to a broad audience efficiently, and reduces the number of ad hoc requests that the department receives. For the public, it makes available data on citizenship, permanent and temporary resident processing, admissions to Canada, and information that has been shown to be both popular and useful.
Thank you for the time you have given me today.
Thank you.