Information & Ethics committee  I have two responses to that. First, I was told that Parliament would start releasing Hansard in XML; I actually haven't been to that website in the last couple of days, but as far as I can tell, it still hasn't. That's a little bit of a disappointment for those of us who were looking forward to that.

Information & Ethics committee  I haven't actually been to the website, so if it's happened, I don't want to upset our good friends who I know are working to try to make this happen. Will there be a cost? I don't want to sit here and say there wouldn't be a cost, because that would be untrue. But here are the two other ways I think you need to be thinking about this.

Information & Ethics committee  Both governments have launched open data portals. So there is data.gov.uk, which has tens of thousands of data sets on it, everything from real spending data to information about all of the local councils. They have a connection with the local councils, and all the budgets for local councils I believe are supposed to be going up there soon as well.

Information & Ethics committee  Maybe it was. We can investigate more closely.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Statistics Canada only has data that it collects, that it hosts. I think what the British are intending to do is significantly more radical than that, which is to say they want to look at data that any ministry collects and to centralize it and manage it from one agency. That's a much grander vision than what StatsCan does.

Information & Ethics committee  I cannot comment. I don't know. My understanding is that this corporation is still just a proposal, it's not actually policy.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not sure that the long-form.... I mean, I've been quite vocal about the long-form census, but I'm not really sure it falls under the purview of this committee or around the debate around open data. What I would say is that the information collected by StatsCan is enormously valuable to not just the government but also a huge number of non-profits and companies.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. You know, if you apply any licence that restricts the use of data, then you have to expect that people are not going to use that data in the most creative or most innovative way. So there's a penalty that you pay whenever you do that. I just don't understand why you would ever limit the use of a public asset like that, especially one that is completely reusable.

Information & Ethics committee  I'd actually argue that right now it's the inverse, that ordinary Canadians are subsidizing corporations. The only reason StatsCan is able to collect this data is that it has access to the citizens' tax base and it can use that to finance the collection of the census and larger data statistics.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm trying to remember the full letter. I wrote it, so I feel as though I'll remember it fairly quickly.

Information & Ethics committee  I'd love to see this government take an aggressive position toward open data, to stand up and say “Regardless of what this committee is doing, tomorrow we are going to create an open data portal. We are going to put these data sets up on it, and then when the committee makes its report, we will look at it and adjust our strategy accordingly and take the best of their ideas and incorporate them.”

Information & Ethics committee  I think I'm referring to the British example again, where rather than wait for a task force committee to make recommendations, they have chosen to move forward and implement a very aggressive open data strategy without the input from a task force. But then as people have made recommendations, they of course corrected it and adjusted it and made it better.

Information & Ethics committee  What I'd love to see is if this committee wanted to model itself after the task force, to think about whether it could include non-parliamentarians on it and to find a group of Canadians who are pan-partisan, who are genuinely interested in figuring out how to best share the data the government has and how to make government as open as possible, given the constraints, and to invite them to sit in on the process and to participate.

Information & Ethics committee  I think you can go one of two ways. You could have people who have made open declarations of their party affiliations. But I think more interesting to me is there are a lot of Canadians out there who really don't identify with any political party but who are deeply interested in their government being as open as possible and being a platform for innovation and improved services.

Information & Ethics committee  With open data, we take the information the government is collecting--again, it doesn't have privacy or security implications--and we simply share it with the public, I would argue, as we receive it. Proactive disclosure, for me, applies less to data and more to information. It's saying “Okay, we've written some reports.