Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me.
Of course, if committee members and you feel that my presentation is too long, I am very flexible and can stop at any time to answer any questions you may have.
Thank you again for this opportunity to appear before you to discuss this very important subject of open government. It's really a tribute to this committee that it is studying this topic on how open government can best serve Canadians.
As interim Information Commissioner, I wish to discuss open government not as an expert in the fields of electronic dissemination of information or information technology, but rather, I wish to discuss it as a proponent of the view that it is urgent that government make a commitment to greater disclosure of its public information and imperative that it develop a comprehensive open government strategy to support it.
The committee has often heard testimony regarding the challenges of providing access to information pursuant to the Access to Information Act. How our law now handles accessing information is fundamentally reactive and reflects the traditional modus operandi of the public sector. It is reactive in the sense that access is granted mostly after someone asks for it.
By contrast, every day, we learn about new initiatives that transform reactive disclosure to the proactive mode. Proactive disclosure refers to an environment where information is routinely disseminated electronically, with the exception of that which the government must protect because it poses a risk to a public or private interest.
It is an environment where information can readily be made available to the public thanks to advances in technology. Proactive disclosure is an essential component of the broader concept of open government. Open government is predicated on a system in which government records are available to citizens in open standard formats that permit an unlimited use and re-use of the information. This facilitates public engagement and participation which, in turn, promotes greater transparency, accountability and trust in government.
Based on our reviews and our discussions with other jurisdictions that are leading the open government movement, successes have been based, I believe, on sets of well-defined principles. To lead the paradigm shift from reactive to proactive disclosure, and ultimately to open government, there must be a made-in-Canada strategy. The strategy must reflect the unique characteristics and informational needs of our own society. In this context, I offer five overarching principles for your consideration, which have been gleaned from the various international jurisdictions.
First, there must be a commitment at the top to lead this cultural change conducive to open government. At a minimum, this involves issuing a declaration on open government with clear objectives. The commitment also entails assigning responsibility and accountability for coordination, guidance, and deliverables. It requires prescribing specific timeframes.
Second, there should be ongoing and broad public consultations. Citizens should be encouraged to participate using electronic means. It is critical to determine what government information the public wants and how they want to receive it.
Third, information should be made accessible in open standard formats and rendered reusable. Information should be derived from various sources and integrated to reduce the silos inherent in bureaucratic structures.
Fourth, privacy, confidentiality, security, crown copyright, and, particularly in Canada, official language issues need to be addressed and resolved.
Finally, open government principles must be anchored in statutory and policy instruments.
It is important to stress, Mr. Chairman, that although our legislation emanates from a period prior to the advent of the personal computer, the BlackBerry, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, its purpose clause is nevertheless consistent with the concept of open government. In section 2 of the ATIA, it states that the
Act is intended to complement and not replace existing procedures for access to government information and is not intended to limit in any way access to the type of...information that is normally available to the general public.
The question is what meaning can we impart to these statements in 2010 given current technologies, the need to achieve public service efficiencies and the public's expectations of the role of government in leading the transformation to open government.
Clearly, there are no legislative impediments to advancing it. The concept is embedded in our information laws. The Access to Information Act anticipated elements of open government in its requirements to describe government programs, services and information holdings in a central register called Info Source to establish public reading rooms within institutions.
The Library and Archives of Canada Act and associated records management policies are based on the premise that sound information management practices enable departments to be more responsive and accountable to Canadians.
Further, Mr. Chairman, I think it's interesting to note that in his annual report to the Prime Minister, the Clerk of the Privy Council alluded to this paradigm shift when he acknowledged that the public service faces considerable pressures, such as the globalization of policy issues, the need for more collaborative decision-making, and the impact of ever-changing technologies. Mr. Wouters contended that the capacity of the public service to rethink the way we work—to plan, to reach out to others for good ideas, and to work together within and across departments—will sustain a high-performing public service.
In addition, it's interesting to note that the report to the Prime Minister, also from Mr. Tellier and Mr. Emerson, emulates the same ideas and promotes fostering the engagement of citizens in a collaborative development of policies and programs as a positive step for the government.
As a first step at the institutional level, each government organization needs to identify the opportunities and means to proactively disclose information. As a means of accomplishing this, the former Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia made a recommendation to the special committee reviewing their own access to information legislation. He proposed that their act be amended to require public bodies to use prescribed access design principles in designing and adopting any information system or program.
The idea here, Mr. Chairman, is also an idea that I know is supported by the national archivist, Dr. Caron, in the sense that the disclosure of information has to be thought about at the beginning of the development of programs and policies so we think in terms of disclosure of information before we develop these programs and policies. This would not only result in more rapid responses to access to information requests, but would lead to direct public access to certain categories of the government's information holdings and facilitate the shift from reactive to proactive access to information.
So what stage are we at in Canada, and what lessons can we learn from colleagues in other jurisdictions? In Canada, there are various open government initiatives of different scopes that are occurring at different levels but without the benefits of central coordination and guidance. I would say this is the main difference between our jurisdiction and other international jurisdictions.
At the federal level, there may have been only very modest attempts at proactive disclosure. Almost ten years ago, the government issued a policy requiring all officials above a certain level to post, on-line, the specific details of their travel and hospitality claims. A few years later with the development of more sophisticated systems and programs, the posting of this information, along with other information including provisions in contracts and grants and contributions, is now done reasonably well by government institutions.
Unfortunately, in the fast-moving information world of 2010, these attempts to open up government information do not represent the wave of the present, much less the wave of the future.
However, there are real signs of progress. Natural Resources Canada offers free access to databases that once entailed substantial user charges. Its GeoConnections Discovery Portal is a metadata catalogue that enables users and data suppliers to access, evaluate, visualize, and publish Canadian geospacial and geoscience data products and web services.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada is now also providing public access to many of their massive immigration databases. I've sent the minister a letter of congratulations for this initiative because I thought it was a very good initiative. Their objective, Mr. Chairman, is to disseminate the most popular data sets to the public without requiring recourse to the Access to Information Act.
National Defence and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency are making their disclosure logs of access to information requests available.
My office is also revamping its public website to include access disclosure logs, internal policy documents, and research and statistical data, which we know our stakeholders are interested in.
Several provincial governments have taken the lead in migrating their programs and services to online portals and rendering them interactive. British Columbia, for instance, has created a research data warehouse that draws information from multiple government sources, thereby removing data from their traditional silos. Newfoundland and Labrador developed the first Internet-based data retrieval system to view and analyze social and economic indicators of well-being.
In November 2009, Quebec's new regulation, the Règlement sur la diffusion de l'information et sur la protection des renseignements personnels, came into effect. It requires 15 categories of government information to be proactively disclosed to the public by means of the government's website. The categories include internal organizational charts, documents of public interest disclosed pursuant to access to information requests, and studies, research and statistical reports of interest to the public. The regulation encompasses a broad range of institutions from provincial ministries to municipalities, school boards and health and social service agencies.
In municipalities, there are a significant number of practical applications being developed by both the cities and citizens. For example, Edmonton, Nanaimo, Toronto and Vancouver have mounted online data catalogues containing information regarding council meetings, fire and rescue response reports, garbage collection and public transit schedules and building permit statistics. Many of these, such as property searches and restaurant sanitation reports, are supported by online search engines that allow the public to retrieve and manipulate the data. Ottawa is also moving forward to capitalize on new technologies to expand its service offerings.
It is at the grassroots level, however, where many of the most innovative initiatives are occurring. These initiatives are an indication of the types of information that Canadians actually want.
A recent Globe and Mail article entitled “If you won't tell us about our MPs, we'll do it for you” may be of interest to this committee. David Eaves, an internationally recognized expert in open government, described new websites mounted by what he calls digital democratic activists. He cited as an example openparliament.ca, which enables the public to see what members of Parliament say, explore how they vote, and search related press stories.
Another example is howdidtheyvote.ca. This site provides a breakdown of members of Parliament's statistics, including the number of words spoken in the session, the frequency with which members vote against their parties, and members' attendance records.
So you are all in the open government stance by virtue of these initiatives that have been done by individual Canadians in their own backyard.
There's a great deal to be learned from the experiences of other countries in implementing open government initiatives. During the past year, the United States launched its much anticipated open government initiative, the British government...under its “smarter government” umbrella, and the Australian Government 2.0 Task Force issued a comprehensive draft report. Significantly, the prominent features common to the inception and evolution of these initiatives, notably in the United States and the United Kingdom, are that they are based on strong leadership and broad public consultation and they are sustained by central repositories of data supported by commonly available tools to access and leverage the data sets. This is the new age of proactive disclosure.
The American open government initiative illustrates the impressive progress that can be achieved when it is being led by their President. In discussions these past few days with our American colleagues, they emphasized the value of leadership and commitment from the top. They referred to the necessity to have clear and unequivocal objectives, and stated that the government is opening doors and data to all citizens to promote transparency, participation, and collaboration.
Transparency is critical to provide citizens with information about what their government is doing so that it can, in turn, be held accountable. It encourages journalists, researchers, government officials, and the public to scrutinize and thereby improve how government works on behalf of citizens.
Participation is essential in that the government must actively solicit expertise from all sectors so that it makes policies with the benefit of the best information available.
Finally, there must be collaboration so that officials work together and with citizens as part of doing their job of solving national problems.
On a practical level, the open government initiative requires agencies to publish information online in a open format so that it can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed and searched by commonly used web search applications. An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable and made available to the public without restrictions that would hamper re-use of that information.
Our colleagues also stressed the importance of setting firm milestones — stages, along with dates. The Obama administration established multi-year targets and an associated evaluation process to measure progress. The consultation process, the initial staged release of agency data sets and progress reports to the American people had to be completed by December 2009, only one year following the President's inauguration.
Leadership from the top also characterizes the British government's commitments as part of its smarter government initiative. It adopted public data principles based on the release of public data sets, which would be made available at no charge. The government promises to release more public information, including health, weather, and traffic data sets, under open licences that enable reuse, including commercial reuse. In fact, the British experience is instructive because it's somewhat different philosophically than the American or the Australian initiatives in that it's very much geared towards gaining efficiencies in public sector service delivery, and that's really very much the focus of the British initiative.
The Australian Government 2.0 Task Force issued its draft report on how to make government information more accessible and usable. The task force's starting premise is that public sector information is a national resource, a national asset, and that releasing as much of it on as permissive terms as possible will maximize its economic and social value and reinforce a healthy democracy. In fact, also an interesting point of the Australian task force is that it actually has some analysis in terms of cost savings in delivering open data to citizens, as opposed to having a reactive mode responsive to simply access to information requests. It also cites in its cost analysis some EU analysis.
It recommends that public sector information should be free, based on open standards, and freely reusable. Since Australian government data is subject to crown copyright restrictions similar to those in Canada, the task force recommends releasing government data on their Creative Commons distribution licence. This means that the government retains copyright but freely licenses the work for reuse with no need for further permissions or compensation and no need for legislative change.
In my view, Canada must move quickly to embrace open government and, in doing so, encourage citizen engagement, especially that of our younger generation. While detractors may claim that rapid adoption of open government poses unacceptable challenges, experience in the “trial and error“ approach in the United States has demonstrated that these challenges can be mitigated by a strategy that allows for adjustments and provides multiple channels for feedback.
In my view, the government should advance the transformation to open government as being in the best interests of this country and its people. The transformation can be founded on the principles of strong leadership, public consultations, enhanced accessibility and a commitment to resolve statutory and policy issues. It can build on the fact that Canada is one of the most connected countries in the world and use this fact as one of the major assets in order to increase government transparency.
In 2010 democracy, government efficiency, and national prosperity share the same core requirement: citizens, experts, and entrepreneurs must be able to easily access, interact with, and reuse current and relevant public domain data.
To quote from an excellent report compiled by Deloitte entitled Unlocking Government: How Data Transforms Democracy:
Government leaders have before them an opportunity to combine the resourcefulness of online citizens and entrepreneurs with the power of factual data to more effectively achieve their mission. In an information-driven age, the ability of governments to seize this opportunity may ultimately determine whether a government fails or succeeds.
Mr. Chairman, I and my office are pleased to assist this committee in this important task within the scope of our very limited mandate. This does not include a research mandate, but we will do everything that this committee requires of us to assist in this deliberation.
Again, thank you very much for the privilege to present you this rather lengthy presentation.
