Information & Ethics Committee on Dec. 9th, 2010

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm sure the Liberals can find some way to do some financial gymnastics to make sure that we don't, but I won't try to answer your rhetorical question.

During the conversation today I've certainly become more convinced that it would be preferable to call it open data rather than open government. I think all of you have agreed that there are pieces of government information that, for many reasons, need to be kept confidential, whether those documents relate to cabinet, international trade, or foreign affairs. I think there may be a misconception on the part of people that when you say open government, it means that everything cabinet is discussing will automatically be open and available online, which you've confirmed for me today is not the case.

I want to go back to the crown copyright question for just a bit. Currently it's possible to reproduce sections, paragraphs, and reasonable amounts of information. I know that in reproducing it within a report or document, there's a risk of intentionally misquoting what the original said. That's probably very rare. I'll acknowledge that. If that were to happen, it would be fairly easy, in my opinion, to go back and compare it to the original and see that in these two paragraphs, for instance, three words are changed and the intent has been changed.

If you have the possibility of reproducing the entire document, is there a risk at all of misrepresenting what the entire document may have said? It may be seen by multiple people, maybe dozens of people, who would assume that it is in its original format, whereas in fact it has been altered. Is that a risk, or doesn't it worry you at all?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

I don't think it represents a significant risk. I don't think it's a copyright issue, quite frankly. It's an issue of whether you trust a particular source. I think what happens over time, as you make the works available, is that you come to trust.... In some instances, you may feel that you're only comfortable relying on the authoritative source.

Law is a good example. Initially many cases and other materials were made available, but lawyers, when citing for court purposes, would still go to official sources, just to be sure. Even the citation system didn't lend itself to allowing people to cite the non-official documents. We've seen this change over time. Now we have neutral citation with respect to court cases. You can more easily cite documents that might not have come from what we previously would have viewed as the most authoritative source.

I recognize, of course, that there is the possibility that someone may take the document, purport that it is accurate, and then make it not accurate, but I don't see it as a significant risk.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

It's not a big worry.

Just to follow up on that, then, you mentioned in your opening statement that the lawyers have taken a collective approach and have charged a fee to make certain statutes available for searching. Did I understand you correctly?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

No, in some ways it's the opposite. It's the lawyers who are paying to make works available.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

That's what I meant. The lawyers themselves are paying to make this particular....

[Dr. Michael Geist]

I should clarify. What has happened is that as part of the dues lawyers pay, they pay a certain amount--it's about $30 a year--to fund this site organization called CanLII. CanLII then has agreements with underlying courts and governments and tribunals that they will make their cases and decisions available to CanLII, and then CanLII posts those on the site. The lawyers are funding, effectively, to keep the website going.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

As a follow-up to that question, is that material available to the broad public, or only to those who have paid into it?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

It's available to all.

The lawyers saw the opportunity to have that material available so that they could reduce some of their expenditures on other legal material from mainstream legal publishers. The nice consequence—and, I would argue, the intended one—was that not only would the legal profession have access to this material, but so too would the Canadian public. Indeed, essentially the entire world has access to Canadian material.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

First, I have a question regarding the data that you three would assume to be the most valuable to have on an open forum. Is there a prioritization? If we were to say that we can't go from zero to 350,000 overnight, where would you recommend the Canadian government begin in making this material available?

Second, Mr. Macmillan mentioned the Facebook phenomenon. Would Facebook be a reasonable source for finding out what Canadians think would be the highest priority of data they'd like?

[Paul Macmillan]

There are a number of categories. I think public accounts--financial-type information, which is published and produced, and which citizens have an interest in--is more or less readily available. It's just another way of publishing. In many respects, it is another way of publishing government information and reports, of which there are a vast number.

Also, a number of data sites are already available. The challenge is that there isn't a clearing house or a consolidated place to get it, so it can be very difficult to find. One of the exercises will undoubtedly be to understand what's already available and how to make it more easily available. The natural resources area is another one where there is potential opportunity for economic spinoff. Those are just a couple of ideas.

As to whether Facebook and other social media sites would be a good way to elicit citizen input, I would certainly think so.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you.

[Dr. Michael Geist]

I think those are good—

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

You can go ahead; it's just that Mr. Albrecht does not have any more questions.

[Dr. Michael Geist]

Those are good areas. Environmental issues interest a lot of Canadians, but the point to take home about the experience in other jurisdictions is that nobody is smart enough to actually know in advance which data sets are going to be the most valuable. However, that's a feature, not a bug. The beauty of making data more available and providing people with the permission, the encouragement, to go ahead and add value to it is that it doesn't cost the public anything at all. It's basically people taking it upon themselves, whether for commercial benefit or in the public interest. People will make use of data that you never thought they would make use of. They will find ways to combine and reuse data in ways that we never envisioned.

The value comes in making it available, but nobody could ever know in advance precisely what's going to be valuable.

[Eric Sauve]

To me that was bang on. We can't predict where our economy and our citizens are going to innovate. Take companies that go down a certain strategic path: often their success comes not from that original path but from something else that comes up along the way. That's the value in having as much data available as possible in as usable a format as possible. When the opportunity arises for folks, they can take advantage of it. You don't know when and you don't know where, so you just have to take that step and make it open.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Mr. Albrecht.

Mr. Siksay is next.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I get excited about this because I like the idea of transparency and open government, and the economic development aspect of it is pretty exciting, too.

However, I'm worrying a bit as I listen, because it strikes me that when we talk about this public asset, once it's up on the Internet, we're not talking about the Canadian public anymore. It's really international. Everybody who has access to the Internet has access to this asset and can use it.

Does that make this open data policy the information equivalent of the export of raw logs? Are we taking a Canadian asset and allowing it to be shipped out of the country unprocessed? How do we guarantee that Canadians get the economic development part of this? How do we ensure that Canadian entrepreneurs are the ones who get to use this data and repurpose it to find those interesting applications? Am I way off track? Are we exporting raw logs by implementing this kind of policy?

[Eric Sauve]

My view on this is that the world is a competitive place, especially when it comes to data and the public Internet. The best way to do it is to release as much data as possible so that we can create as many competitive firms as possible here in Canada. If there are other firms coming from other jurisdictions that are already building momentum around data that have been released by government--for instance, in the United States--those companies are going to come in and demolish whatever opportunity might have been available for a Canadian start-up, because you have a giant behemoth coming from wherever they're coming from, and they already know how to do it. They know the process. They know the delivery mechanism. They know the distribution channel. They have all their supply chain arrangements completed.

To me, when you talk about resources like things that you dig up from the ground, it's a different economic model. In the information age and on the Internet, there's no stopping competition. The best thing you can do is create an economic centre where you get that innovation that truly drives it.

Why is Silicon Valley so successful? Where are all the other information technology firms growing in the United States? It's hard to find large companies outside of Silicon Valley that have had the explosive growth that some of these Internet firms have had. They go from zero to billions of dollars of valuation. It's because they create that innovative nucleus.

By making available the assets that can be mined by these information technology companies, to use your metaphor, and by doing lots of it, you create companies that can then be successful, and we can export our companies over to other countries that are doing those things and we can start to compete.

That's definitely my view.

[Dr. Michael Geist]

We're not talking about a scarce resource. The only scarcity we have with respect to it is an artificial scarcity that's been established essentially by government in not making it available. The fact that others may have access to this information doesn't mean that Canadians don't and can't try to compete in terms of making it available. I would argue that Canadian citizens are the ultimate beneficiary, regardless of who ultimately takes this information and adds sufficient value to give some real benefits to it.

If a foreign company comes in and finds ways to add value to Canadian data so that Canadians know more about their environmental conditions, their communities, or whatever the issue happens to be, there's still a benefit to Canada. Some of the economic benefits may accrue to a company that has come in and provided that, but that's what competition is all about. In some ways, not making this available has hamstrung the ability of Canadian businesses to actively engage at home in this area and to compete in some of the bigger markets. Canada is a small market in terms of these data. The real value would come through building some Canadian companies and letting them compete in a market with 10 times the population and presumably 10 times the amount of data.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I think in Australia.... The information officer from the City of Edmonton talked about local competitions that those governments have done to stimulate development in these areas. Does that mean there is still a role for government economic development programs associated with this kind of open data program? Would government still would have a role in that? Have they been effective programs, necessary programs?

[Paul Macmillan]

What governments have been trying to do with these competitions is to engage citizens. It's one thing to make the data available, but what they also found was the issue of how we instill the energy, the imagination, and the creativity in people to try to apply it, so they run competitions to bring attention to what they're doing. There have been a number of them. They've had all sorts of different ones. Some were strictly cultural and social, while others had an economic bent to them in terms of what's come back.

I fully support the previous comments that it's really about encouraging creativity in the provision of public services, because there's a stream of this that is all about getting citizens engaged in delivering better public services, and there's another whole stream that is about economic development, innovation, and investment. Both of those can be achieved through the same means.

There was an earlier comment about not really being able to predict where that creativity is going to come from. I think that's really key, because there can be a tendency to hold things back while you're trying to think about what the right thing to do is. In many respects, that can really be counterproductive.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Go ahead, Dr. Bennett.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

I just want to go back to the.... Did you call it the crown commons? Maybe we all need to read the chapter.

Mr. Chair, are you going to buy us all a Christmas present?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

I'd be very happy to provide you with copies.

Actually, your colleague, Mr. Lake, asked me specifically about this book when I appeared for Bill C-32. I'm happy to make copies of the book available, but I should note that it's actually available under creative commons licence by the publisher, so all articles are free to download.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

We can download the whole book?