Government Operations committee  No matter what the information is, if you're naming a particular individual or a particular business, there's a challenge. One has to look very carefully in terms of how that information is put up and perhaps interpreted, particularly if you're talking about inspections or failed

Government Operations committee  It's my pleasure. Thank you.

Government Operations committee  It has 39,000 business members across the country.

Government Operations committee  There are two ways. One is our district representatives, who are based all across the country and have their own predefined territories, collect information face to face with business owners when they renew their memberships, or when they are bumping into them in their own local

Government Operations committee  Yes. We check very closely to what degree we can, with external datasets about the representativeness of the information. You might have seen our business barometer survey, which is sent out to a different group of members every month, and we get very consistent results back. So

Government Operations committee  Yes. They can access that information. We push that survey data back out to them to the degree they want. We make this available freely. We have never put a price on this information. It's always available to those free of charge. We have made datasets available to other analysts

Government Operations committee  I'd walk before running on that front. I think getting information out to the intermediaries and small-business associations like ours and others would be a good start to a degree, and then monitor usage and see if it goes up significantly. We've only got a couple of years of det

Government Operations committee  Are you directing that to me?

Government Operations committee  I'm not quite sure what the question was.

Government Operations committee  Let's see some of the additional movements in making this available, once we see more specific information that we think has more currency within the small-business sector. We are certainly letting people know. For example, Industry Canada data benchmarking is something we've bee

Government Operations committee  I think the information that we wanted to collect has been largely along the lines of specific wage and price information. Actually, getting back to some of the information that we've been very happy with in the past, and that we recommended other members go see, is information p

Government Operations committee  No, I received the invitation to appear before the committee. I've worked with, as I said, various parts of government over the past couple of decades, but specifically on the data.gc.ca, I hadn't been in discussions with that. My role isn't necessarily on the legislative side.

Government Operations committee  I don't have frustrations. I think we've seen some progress. We're very happy to see that CANSIM and many of the micro-data series have been freed up by StatsCan. We would like to see more micro-data provided, because it provides very informative sets of information for small fir

Government Operations committee  The one issue, the one item that I've been chatting with StatsCan about for many years has been how to help small businesses plan their businesses better. We understand they probably can't find good data on basmati rice consumption within Arnprior, Ontario. It's just not availabl

Government Operations committee  It's always valuable to consider that side of things. Marketplaces work far better wherever there is better access to information; there are fewer mistakes made. I think that generally competition has good impacts on the economic structure, because successful businesses generally