Evidence of meeting #40 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was make.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Liberal
Conservative
Patricia Davidson Conservative Sarnia—Lambton, ON
Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thanks, Mr. Eaves, for being with us today. Certainly it's been an interesting presentation that you've given to us.
You started out saying that anyone under 30 would probably think our system is broken. When you look around this room, maybe we need to have some younger people sitting at this table too for this particular exercise. I certainly am not an expert in technicalities when it comes to the Internet and to these types of things, but it's certainly been an interesting learning experience.
One thing sort of along the lines that the last questioner was asking was on the economic end of it. You said that it strengthens the economy through better data access. Then you used an example of billions of gallons of oil that can be saved because people are using GPS and are not getting lost any more. How do jurisdictions quantify or identify something like that?
As an Individual
That's a good question. I don't have a good answer for you in the short term. Can you directly attribute a savings to the release of a given data set? That's going to be a very tough challenge.
What I think you are going to be able to see, over time--and I think again we're very early days--is certain economies that have access to more information about their economy and the communities they serve, and because they have more access to information, they are going to become more efficient and they are going to grow faster.
Data is like the plankton of our ecosystem, of the economy in the 21 century. So if you starve that system of plankton or another system has more of it, they're going to thrive more. I think there will be some very simple examples we'll be able to look at.
There might be some specific ones. When I look at Vancouver, and I look at some of the stuff that's been done, there's a local architecture firm, Bing Thom Architects, that has taken open data from the city's portal and has written a number of reports. It's looked at what rising sea levels will do to the city of Vancouver and the costs it will have on building infrastructure. Those reports are very powerful for city hall staff and for councillors. I don't know how many free consulting services we've received from Bing Thom Architects so far, but I've got to believe it's somewhere north of $100,000 to $200,000. So that's real value that's generated for the city and for the citizens.
Can I quantify that en masse? It would be a very difficult challenge.
Conservative
Patricia Davidson Conservative Sarnia—Lambton, ON
Well, I think it is definitely extremely important that this information become available. Certainly I think the people on this side of the table are supportive of open data and open government.
When we first started talking about this exercise, one of things we started out talking about was proactive disclosure, and then it changed into open government. I think you've indicated there are certainly a lot of differences. Could you elaborate on that a little bit more?
As an Individual
With open data, we take the information the government is collecting--again, it doesn't have privacy or security implications--and we simply share it with the public, I would argue, as we receive it.
Proactive disclosure, for me, applies less to data and more to information. It's saying “Okay, we've written some reports. We've made an analysis. We have a proposed policy, and we're going to release that before the alloted time we're allowed to keep it secret runs out or in anticipation of a public debate that we think needs to happen.” So for me, proactive disclosure is disclosing things in advance of when you need to, or just aggressively disclosing information. I would love to see more proactive disclosure as well. I just want to keep it separate from the open data debate, which I think doesn't have the same constraints on it that open information does.
Conservative
Patricia Davidson Conservative Sarnia—Lambton, ON
When you talk about the open data distribution, is there any issue with the integrity of the information that gets posted? Are people able to do whatever with that information, and is that a concern in any of the jurisdictions that have done it, that some of the integrity is not being maintained?
As an Individual
The answer is yes. I want to be very clear: On an open data portal, such as the City of Vancouver has...no one can go and change the data the City of Vancouver has.
Conservative
As an Individual
They can take the data, and then they can change the data they have on themselves and then share that, but the fidelity of that data is maintained, because anybody who looks at something that's created with it will simply go back to the original and compare them and say “Why did you change these things?”
There's another thing I've noticed. Frequently I get this question from government officials who are worried that people are going to change the data. I'll be honest with you: when I talk to developers and researchers out there, they're not concerned about changing the data; they're actually really concerned about your data being accurate. When a Google map is incorrect because the information the government gave Google isn't correct, or when you have spending projections and someone makes a typo in a spending projection document, people don't get mad at the government, they get mad at the company that created the application or that offers the service. So they want to make sure that it's as accurate as possible.
I think people are much more worried about government's data being accurate--and I think we should be--than they are about people changing the data and doing something with it, because when they do, we'll still be able to check on them.
Liberal
Bloc
Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac Bloc Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to begin by wishing everyone here a happy new year.
Sir, thank you for sharing your views with us. They're very interesting.
I'm going to ask you questions on some of the information from the open letter you wrote to us, dated December 8, 2010. I want to focus on the second point you raised. Do you know what I'm talking about?
As an Individual
I'm trying to remember the full letter. I wrote it, so I feel as though I'll remember it fairly quickly.
Bloc
Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac Bloc Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC
In the second point, you talk about “transform[ing] the Committee into a government 2.0 taskforce—similar to the Australian effort.”
However, you say the following: “Frankly, my favourite approach in this space has been the British.”
What would you prefer?
January 31st, 2011 / 4:40 p.m.
As an Individual
I'd love to see this government take an aggressive position toward open data, to stand up and say “Regardless of what this committee is doing, tomorrow we are going to create an open data portal. We are going to put these data sets up on it, and then when the committee makes its report, we will look at it and adjust our strategy accordingly and take the best of their ideas and incorporate them.” I see there is nothing that prevents us from doing that.
My big fear is that we're going to sit around and wait till we have the perfect answer and that we're never going to have a perfect answer. We're going to have good answers. Actually, we already have them, so let's move forward with those today and make them better as we discover more things tomorrow.
Bloc
Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac Bloc Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC
I might have another question in view of your answer.
You say that the British approach is better than the Australian one. Could you give us some examples?
As an Individual
I think I'm referring to the British example again, where rather than wait for a task force committee to make recommendations, they have chosen to move forward and implement a very aggressive open data strategy without the input from a task force. But then as people have made recommendations, they of course corrected it and adjusted it and made it better.
So my preference is that model, that the government move forward. But short of that, I would love to see this committee look at the task force and see what lessons it can draw from the Australian task force and make itself better and stronger.
Bloc
Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac Bloc Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC
In the second point, the following is stated:
[...] the Committee should copy the best parts of the Australian taskforce. [...] Rather than non-partisan, I would suggest that a Canadian taskforce should be pan-partisan—which the committee already is.
I would like you to explain to us what you mean by this statement.
As an Individual
What I'd love to see is if this committee wanted to model itself after the task force, to think about whether it could include non-parliamentarians on it and to find a group of Canadians who are pan-partisan, who are genuinely interested in figuring out how to best share the data the government has and how to make government as open as possible, given the constraints, and to invite them to sit in on the process and to participate.
I think there's an enormous amount of expertise in this country, and it would be sad to me if they weren't leveraged simply because they weren't able to sit on this committee as elected officials but they were at your disposal to be used whenever necessary.
Bloc
Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac Bloc Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC
I want to make sure that I understand your definition of the word “pan-partisan”. My definition is possibly different from yours. I would like you to give me your definition of this term.
As an Individual
I think you can go one of two ways. You could have people who have made open declarations of their party affiliations. But I think more interesting to me is there are a lot of Canadians out there who really don't identify with any political party but who are deeply interested in their government being as open as possible and being a platform for innovation and improved services. I'd be looking to figure out who those Canadians are. I'm actually pretty sure that if this committee put its head to it, it could identify three to four people who are like that.
Sorry, just as an ironic side note, nobody asked, but the French version of that document you're reading actually went through Google Translate and never was edited after that fact. So even this committee already is using Google Translate to read its documents.
