Government Operations committee  My name is David Eaves. Since I'm listed here as speaking “As an Individual” and don't have the credentials of some of my peers, perhaps I'll start with a little bit of background on me. For the last five, six, seven years, I have been working to make open data happen in Canada.

Information & Ethics committee  Mostly I would say that while I understand that this topic appears rather technical, there is a growing group of people, a kind of movement out there who are deeply interested in the information data that government has, and the businesses that can be built around it, the way tha

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you.

Information & Ethics committee  That site I believe is almost two years old.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely.

Information & Ethics committee  Right. My understanding is that Stats Canada makes the bulk of its money from very customized surveys for specific players, or in writing reports for the government. The raw data itself does not generate a significant amount of revenue for them. So really it's just an impediment

Information & Ethics committee  The Australian site is a little bit newer and doesn't have quite as much data, but it has been launched. And they've also tackled the licensing regime around data. So here you have parliamentary democracies like ours that have crown copyright, and they've worked very hard to re

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. We are--

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. We are falling further and further behind, and I would say significantly behind, because the moment you decide to do this, there's a runway that you have to go down in order to even just get to the place where you can launch. I think the British site is now two years old.

Information & Ethics committee  I won't claim to know the American and the British access to information systems as well as I could to be able to really make a strong comparison. All I know is that--

Information & Ethics committee  Nor the Australian. All I will say is that the amount of time that one has to wait for an access to information request to be completed in Canada is so long that I would argue the system is broken and we need to radically rethink how we're doing this. This is one of the reasons w

Information & Ethics committee  It's very hard to pin down how much money Stats Canada actually makes from the data it sells on its website.

Information & Ethics committee  Right.

Information & Ethics committee  And the innovative services that we could be rolling out. One of the things that struck me--and maybe they're doing this, but from what I could tell from their website, they're not--is I believe it's Agriculture Canada that has a widget that shows you products that have been re

Information & Ethics committee  Maybe. That's why--