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
John McCallum Liberal Markham—Unionville, ON
Thank you.
On Australia and the U.K., you did make a recommendation on process in the sense of expanding this committee to include some experts. But I'm interested in the substance of what they've done in Australia or the U.K. You know the Canadian system of the degree to which information is available and not available to the public. So in what ways have either Australia or the U.K. changed their system to be more information friendly than Canada is today?
January 31st, 2011 / 4:50 p.m.
As an Individual
Both governments have launched open data portals. So there is data.gov.uk, which has tens of thousands of data sets on it, everything from real spending data to information about all of the local councils. They have a connection with the local councils, and all the budgets for local councils I believe are supposed to be going up there soon as well.
As an Individual
The Australian site is a little bit newer and doesn't have quite as much data, but it has been launched.
And they've also tackled the licensing regime around data. So here you have parliamentary democracies like ours that have crown copyright, and they've worked very hard to rethink what the licences are for the information and for the data they release.
For example, the Australians, when they released their most recent budget, I believe released it under our creative commons licence--not a copyright licence--so people could use the information in the budget more openly and do whatever they wanted with it. I thought that was really interesting and innovative.
And the British I think are working on a whole new licensing regime for everything they publish, which is very, very liberal. It allows for basically any type of reuse.
Liberal
John McCallum Liberal Markham—Unionville, ON
Well, I remember the U.S. too.... When we were comparing Canadian and U.S. fiscal stimulus plans, one could go to a U.S. website and get very detailed information that certainly did not exist in Canada.
So would you say Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. are way ahead of us right now?
As an Individual
Yes. We are falling further and further behind, and I would say significantly behind, because the moment you decide to do this, there's a runway that you have to go down in order to even just get to the place where you can launch.
I think the British site is now two years old. The Americans' site is definitely two years old. It's not like we are two years behind them; we need to be thinking more along the lines that we are four years behind them.
Liberal
John McCallum Liberal Markham—Unionville, ON
Okay.
So what about the open information? You've talked about portals containing data for those three countries. What about comparing their access to information with ours?
As an Individual
I won't claim to know the American and the British access to information systems as well as I could to be able to really make a strong comparison. All I know is that--
As an Individual
Nor the Australian. All I will say is that the amount of time that one has to wait for an access to information request to be completed in Canada is so long that I would argue the system is broken and we need to radically rethink how we're doing this. This is one of the reasons why I think open data is interesting. When you look at the U.S., there has been some evidence that open data portals have actually reduced the number of what we would call ATIP requests, therefore taking some of the pressure off that system.
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
David, I understand that in the mid-eighties they brought in cost recovery at Stats Canada, but I understand that they don't really make a lot of money from it. Is it $6 million or something like that?
As an Individual
It's very hard to pin down how much money Stats Canada actually makes from the data it sells on its website.
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
Selling an intricate analysis for a company, we think they should pay for that--
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
But the real data, if it was up and free, you're saying that would really contribute to our economy.
As an Individual
Right. My understanding is that Stats Canada makes the bulk of its money from very customized surveys for specific players, or in writing reports for the government. The raw data itself does not generate a significant amount of revenue for them. So really it's just an impediment to people in other sectors making use of it in interesting ways.
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
At the Public Health Agency, obviously the FCM and the municipalities were pretty upset at having to pay for data, as municipal governments, but we were able to provide the map generator project, where they could actually at least put that data in and get maps out of it, in terms of GIS mapping of social determinants of health and all those sorts of things. That's just an example of all the things you could do as government to make it easy for people to see the data, or whatever we used to say--if a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth a thousand pictures.
