Thank you very much, and it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation. I'm very glad to see the interest on the part of the committee on the topic of open government.
My role at Deloitte is to lead our public sector industry practice for Canada, so we have quite a lot of interactions with governments across the country.
Open government has been a growing trend since about 2007. It appeared first at the local level, fuelled by a few things such as increased data from systems such as 311 systems, which provided a lot more information on municipal services than was available before. Many municipalities, starting with the City of New York, as many of you would know, began to publish that information online on their websites in terms of service calls and the status of service calls. It was used by citizen activists, particularly in the U.S., who wanted to look for ways to combine public information and public data to get everything from transit maps to street repair information to a whole range of possible uses of public information, and of course, it was used by councillors who wanted to be able to communicate through social media with city constituents.
So we saw it first at the municipal level. Washington, D.C., was the vanguard, back around 2007. It was an early and big adopter of the idea of releasing public data. We have seen cities across the U.S. and Canada and internationally follow suit, but national governments have also gotten involved. The U.S. federal government, the U.K. government, and the Australian government in particular have launched very significant initiatives in terms of providing public data to citizens through sites such as Data.gov, which is a major data platform or data clearing house of the U.S. government.
In the U.S., for example, since January 2000 the U.S. federal government has released 305,000 data sets onto their site. Something like 256 applications have been developed by citizens, not-for-profits, and others utilizing those data. Many of you will know that the U.K. is releasing public accounts information on a site they call COINS. They have released several million data items related to public expenditure information. We began to write about this in about 2008, and I think some of you have the document that we've produced, called “Unlocking Government: How Data Transforms Democracy”, with its provocative subtitle.
In Canada the municipal level has been embracing open government for some time. We see that Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, and a number of other cities have opened data sites.
At the provincial level it has been a bit slower. B.C. has recently announced their open government initiative and recently ran quite a successful campaign in connection with what they called action against climate change. They released some 500 data sets across, I think, four or five ministries, ran a competition to get citizens to come up with creative ways to develop applications to use that information, had private companies sponsor the event, came up with a number of applications that were developed, and awarded prizes. Overall it was very successful in terms of engaging citizens.
At the federal level, data have been traditionally available from a number of different sources. Examples include Natural Resources Canada, with their geospatial data, as well as Stats Canada, Environment Canada, and others. However, there has not been as comprehensive an approach as we've seen in some of the other federal jurisdictions, and the idea of a central clearing house of data has not yet taken hold, although I would assume that's likely to be introduced.
The final comment I would make is that leading governments have really taken a view that public data should be viewed as a public asset--that this is information that citizens, businesses, not-for-profits, and others should have access to and should be able to utilize creatively in terms of looking to improve public services and as a way to encourage citizen engagement, investment on the part of business, and innovation broadly.
That's all I have by way of opening comments. I'd be happy to field some questions following my colleagues.