I'll deal with the second part first, the issue of government.
For a number of years the perception of government in the online environment was this e-government, this notion of delivering government services online. That is a very good thing. In fact, Canada was seen as being very good at it. Today there is in many countries an increasing emphasis on what might be seen not as e-government but rather as open government, saying that we can take many of the data sets that reside in government—and not all of these are political policy things. This is everything from weather data--weather data is a classic one that we take for granted--to government-generated, which we make available, and you get economic ecosystems that develop around that. But at the moment there is still a lot of data--population data, labour data, Statistics Canada data, Industry Canada data--largely in data sets that are not readily accessible.
What we are seeing take place at the national level in other countries like the U.S. and the U.K. is to try to put those data sets online and then make them freely available to mix and reuse, in a sense to mash up and have the public add value to it. I can't tell you necessarily everything that is going to happen with that other than to say we are going to see things happen with it.
In Vancouver right now they put their data up, everything from basic garbage collection data to other kinds of municipal service-type data, and they said you can do what you like with it. I was just literally this morning at a meeting on open government, and one of the initiatives they were talking about was VanTrash. For whatever reason, Vancouver changes the dates of trash collection every month. I don't understand why, but apparently they do. What did this do? This took Google Maps, mashed it up with the data the city was supplying, and allowed people to take a look at where they were and to get an e-mail notification the night before their trash was scheduled to be removed. It is the sort of thing we would typically think of as e-government, and in fact, it's not the government providing it, it's the public that is using this data to build and mash up on it.
So I think we're seeing a lot of that and I think there would be a lot of value in doing that.
On the issue of digitization, there are a number of digitization initiatives that are taking place. The University of Alberta is doing some things where it tries to take some of our cultural heritage and bring it into the online world. The best-known digitization initiative anywhere right now is the Google initiative. It is of course taking books and digitizing them.
The Google initiative is a great initiative, but if we live in a world where the only major digitizer is Google, that's a problem. What we need is to recognize that we are a relatively small country. We could, if we wanted, create a national digital library in which we digitize everything. We could start, if we wanted, just with works that are in the public domain. If you want to start with what is non-controversial, no longer copyright-associated, and everything in the public domain all gets digitized, and from there start moving toward all the other works, you could find ways.
Germany is trying to move forward with the same kind of thing and to do it in a way that builds in some kind of compensation model when the works are being used. But if you do that, what could be a better way of ensuring access by Canadians and by the world to Canadian culture than by ensuring it is available in a digital format?