Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 9th, 2011

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

I call the meeting to order.

I want to welcome everyone here.Bienvenue à tous. This meeting is called in continuation of the committee's ongoing study into open government and open data.

We have a very interesting meeting this afternoon. We've had about at least six meetings on this study, but this is the first occasion on which we're actually going to hear from Government of Canada witnesses as to what is being done, what is proposed to be done, and what plans are being worked upon.

The committee is very pleased to have with us Madame Corinne Charette, the chief information officer of the Treasury Board Secretariat. She is accompanied by Stephen Walker, senior director of information management strategies in the chief information officer branch.

We have two departments represented. The first department is the Department of Natural Resources. As you will recall, colleagues, back in an earlier testimony from the Information Commissioner, the Department of Natural Resources was out there as probably one of the better examples within the Government of Canada. We have with us Mr. Brian Gray, assistant deputy minister, earth sciences sector; Mr. Bill Merklinger, assistant deputy minister and chief financial officer, corporate management and services sector; and Mr. Prashant Shukle, director general, mapping information branch.

Finally, from the Department of the Environment, we have Mr. Chuck Shawcross, assistant deputy minister and chief information officer, chief information officer branch.

On behalf of every member of the committee, I want to thank you for your appearances here this afternoon. I want to thank you for your efforts in this regard. We're going to have opening comments from each of the departments and then we will go to questions from members.

I'm going to start with you, Madame Charette. Proceed with your opening comments, please.

[Corinne Charette, Chief Information Officer, Treasury Board Secretariat]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to appear before you on the topic of open government.

My name is Corinne Charette. I am the chief information officer for the Government of Canada. I lead the CIOB branch at Treasury Board Secretariat, which provides strategic direction and leadership in the government for four policy areas: access to information and privacy, information management, information technology, and government security. I am accompanied by Mr. Stephen Walker, senior director for information management at CIOB.

Within the Treasury Board Secretariat, my branch is responsible for establishing the overall government-wide strategic directions across the four policy areas that we manage. We do this....

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Madam Charette, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but everything is being translated here. If you could slow it down by perhaps 20%, it would make it just that much easier for the staff behind you there.

[Corinne Charette]

Very well. Thank you. I'm sorry about that.

Alors, I'll carry on.

Within Treasury Board Secretariat, my branch is responsible for establishing the overall government-wide strategic directions across the four policy areas we manage. We do this in alignment with legislation and in consultation with departments. We also monitor compliance by departments with the policy instruments we publish.

The secretariat plays an important enabling role. We support all departments and agencies through collaboration, the issuance of policy instruments, and by providing ongoing guidance to our communities of practice.

Open government has become a topic of interest to both the public and to public servants in all jurisdictions. As a result, the Treasury Board Secretariat, through my sector, the chief information officer branch, has initiated work to develop supporting strategies.

Open government is a new and broad term. From the secretariat's perspective, we define it as encompassing three key pillars or activities in support of the principles of open government. These activities are already under way across the federal public service. The three activities I will be discussing are open data, open information--for both public servants and Canadians--and open dialogue.

We refer to the ability to provide information that can be easily located, accessed, and, if useful, repurposed or reused by the public online as open data. My colleagues from Natural Resources Canada and Environment Canada will speak to what their departments are enabling in this regard.

The ability of a public servant in one department to easily locate and access information or a knowledge repository managed by another department and to engage in an online dialogue within the government forum--such as in our Government of Canada wiki, which we call GCPedia--will be called open information for public servants.

The ability of the government to engage in online dialogues with the public for the purposes of soliciting input or feedback, as was done by the Minister of Industry this past spring in his public consultations on the digital economy strategy, we will refer to as open dialogue.

The chief information officer branch recognizes that open data can indeed be further facilitated for the benefit of the public, particularly with regard to the ease of locating data sets of interest and the ability to secure access to these data sets in machine-readable formats. We are also aware of the potential economic and social value or benefits of repurposing data sets by and for Canadians.

The Treasury Board Secretariat is developing a strategy in consultation with a broad range of departments to determine if there are specific goals that the Government of Canada should have with regard to open data. These goals would support the identification and development of policies and policy instruments that would help in the management of open government data in the future.

The second area, open information for public servants, is where a forum for knowledge in government has been created. An example is the widespread adoption and use of GCPedia, which now has over 21,000 contributing public servants as users, and which has been a focus area of my branch since 2009. We are very pleased with the engagement of public servants across Canada. In fact, the clerk commented in his Seventeenth Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada, and I quote:

Adopting Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis can help us to improve the productivity of our workplaces and better harness the skills and knowledge of public servants across the country.

On the topic of open information for Canadians, the government has made several improvements to ensuring that Canadians have better access to information. Canada has led many jurisdictions in this domain, and it was among the first to adopt federal access to information legislation. That occurred in 1983, prior to the advent of the Internet.

Since then the government has taken measures to continue to regularly make more of its information available to Canadians. For example, in 2004 the government increased transparency with the introduction of its first proactive disclosure initiative on travel and hospitality expenses, and it has made this information available online.

Over the years, this was followed by other online posting initiatives, such as contracts over $10,000 and grants and contributions over $25,000.

Subsequently, with the adoption of the Federal Accountability Act in 2007, we added 70 new federal institutions under the Access to Information Act and improved the administration of the act through the implementation of new policies. The most recent policy change to be implemented is the new requirement for the collection of annual access to information statistical data. Starting in April 2011, institutions will start to compile more data, such as the number of pages processed, timelines, extensions, consultations, and delays.

Finally, this year the Treasury Board Secretariat, through the chief information officer branch, has been working with government institutions to post summaries of completed Access to Information Act requests on their websites. To date a number of institutions, including the Treasury Board Secretariat, are posting these summaries.

Today the government is focusing on new ways to initiate online dialogue with the public. As a whole, the Government of Canada has been increasingly using new ways to engage citizens. A recent example is the cross-country and online consultations process undertaken by the Red Tape Reduction Commission. This process started in mid-January of this year. The government is collecting feedback from Canadians and posting their responses online as they come in day by day. Another example, as I mentioned earlier, is the substantive series of consultations held by the industry minister in 2010 on the digital economy strategy, which provided Canadians with a variety of social media platforms to take part in the discussion. Initiatives like these are becoming more common in the government's day-to-day business.

The Treasury Board Secretariat recognizes this and recognizes that we need to address information management requirements for such online conversations with the public. We need to ensure that in accordance with our existing legislation, proper requirements are in place for the retention of records and for the management of any personal information provided through these dialogues.

In conclusion, the Treasury Board Secretariat, and in particular the chief information officer branch, continues to support and enable the evolution of open data and open government, which is consistent with the government's commitment to transparency. However, the wealth and breadth of our information holdings, coupled with the requirements to ensure compliance with a number of our legal and policy areas, including accessibility, official languages, access to information and privacy, and information management, mandates a careful, well-thought-out approach and plan, which we are working on.

Mr. Chair, this concludes my remarks. I would be pleased to answer the questions from the committee.

Merci.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Merci, Madame Charette.

We're now going to hear from the Department of Natural Resources. Speaking to us will be Mr. Gray, the assistant deputy minister.

[Dr. Brian Gray, Assistant Deputy Minister, Earth Sciences Sector, Department of Natural Resources]

Honourable Chair, distinguished members, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak with you today about NRCan's experience with open data.

Mr. Chair, as you mentioned earlier, I have with me today Mr. Prashant Shukle, Director General at the Mapping Information Branch, and Mr. Bill Merklinger, Assistant Deputy Minister and Chief Financial Officer at the Corporate Management and Services Sector.

We are here to describe the experiences of NRCan's earth sciences sector with open geo-data.

First, let me explain that geo-data are the basic geographic or geoscience data that describe Canada's landmass. Some notable examples include geological information about the interior of the earth to topographic information that includes the location of watersheds and roads.

One distinguishing aspect of these data is that they are all defined by a location or position. Additionally, they are often relevant in multiple applications, ranging from property rights, to government policy decisions, to environmental assessments, to estimating resource potential, to in-car GPS navigation.

Throughout the history of our sector, beginning with the founding of the Geological Survey of Canada in 1842, our fundamental objective has been to make geo-data publicly available to Canadians in the most useful form possible. In the early days, the most useful form possible generally meant recording data on paper maps. Over time, we progressed to managing our geo-data holdings as digital files on computers, although the final product was still in paper form, most notably in maps. Today we make raw data accessible over the Internet in forms that can be manipulated, combined, and transformed according to need. While maps remain incredibly useful, the array of tools that can be easily used to visualize trends in multiple data sets is staggering. We have followed this evolution with the motivation of continually enhancing public accessibility, usability, and reuse of the data we collect.

We are proud of our history, which includes some notable milestones. In 1906, we published the first Atlas of Canada in book form. The last paper edition of this atlas was completed in 1993, and in 1994, it was freely available on the Internet. In 1925, we created a national repository of aerial photographs of Canada. Although topographic mapping was started in the Geological Survey of Canada in the 1840s, it was not until about 1950 that a program was put in place dedicated to completing the topographic mapping of Canada. We will complete this program in 2012.

In 1998, we opened a digital portal called GeoGratis to distribute various types of freely available geo-data. In 2007, we removed the fees for those few remaining data sets that were not free, and we made the data openly available on GeoGratis. In some cases, we still charge a fee if the data are delivered via a physical medium.

What has producing open data meant to the earth sciences sector of Natural Resources Canada? First, we have realized cost savings, because we no longer require production runs of paper copies. We also do not need physical storage space or a vast distribution network to disseminate physical products. However, there are new costs associated with maintaining servers, dealing with bandwidth and licences, and uploading data files.

Currently we are also responding to the ever-rising public expectation that all data are updated regularly. If the demand for open data increases, such costs are likely to rise. We have learned that accessible, free data are very much in demand. For example, there were fewer than a million geo-data downloads from our site in 2007, but they increased in a three-year period to over eleven million downloads last year. These are impressive numbers, but these are not downloads of interesting pictures or video clips. These are large, complex data sets accompanied by detailed metadata. This means that they are most likely downloaded purposefully by someone who has the tools to manipulate the data and who sees potential benefit from reuse of these data.

While the download statistics indicate that geo-data are considered useful, the economic and social impact of geo-data reuse can be difficult to quantify. Because they are open data, we may not always know who the users are, which data they value, and what they are achieving with the data. Conceptually, if we accept that if the original data acquisition was judged to provide value for money, any additional reuse can only compound the benefits. However, to better understand the impact of open data, we will be contracting a quantitative study on reuse of the data over the next two years.

With more than ten years of experience in open geo-data, the earth sciences sector has learned many lessons, but please remember our starting point. The earth sciences sector of Natural Resources Canada has always intended that the geo-data it collects and manages would be used by governments, industry, and citizens. Hence, we have spent much of our history collaborating with other departments and agencies in the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, along with industry and developers, to build consensus on standards for geo-data. Even when they were displayed only on paper maps, we were doing this.

We have also taken our responsibilities seriously when dealing with issues of official languages, privacy, confidentiality, security, intellectual property, copyright, and attribution. These responsibilities are somewhat complex, as several of our data sets are, in fact, integrated contributions from multiple collaborating organizations. For example, the data we have made available through our GeoBase initiative involves data from federal, provincial, and territorial agencies.

The ongoing broad-based engagement effort has been worth it. The standards and approaches we have today are the key to enabling the accessibility and interoperability of the data and will enable future breakthroughs, breakthroughs that are yet to be imagined today and that make open data so attractive. This work on standards will continue, and it continues today.

The combination of today's technology, standards, and data is fuelling an increased demand for digital information and creating multiple potential new markets, societal benefits, and opportunities. Importantly, this new world is no longer the exclusive domain of highly specialized technicians or technical experts. More and more, it includes members of the general public, many of whom are new to the use of geo-data.

In closing, I want to reiterate that, from NRCan's perspective, our deliberate and intentional move towards open data was neither simple nor was it accomplished in the last few years.

In fact, we had been working through the issues of “open data” for most of our history, long before the Internet community introduced a phrase to describe the concept. Yet, the journey has definitely been worthwhile, and we are beginning to see substantial benefits and new opportunities arising from our efforts.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. We would be happy to respond to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Mr. Gray.

Finally, we're going to hear from Mr. Shawcross from the Department of the Environment.

[Chuck Shawcross, Assistant Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer, Chief Information Officer Branch , Department of the Environment]

Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee.

I am the assistant deputy minister of the chief information officer branch of Environment Canada. As a chief information officer, I am responsible for the management of our computer infrastructure, including such products and services as networks, desktop computers, mobile devices, email, databases, websites, and weather prediction systems.

I appreciate your invitation to appear before you today to discuss Environment Canada's current capabilities in making data available to the public. I would also like to provide you with a chief information officer's perspective on the considerations related to technical implementation of these public-facing sites.

Environment Canada has a long history of gathering and making weather information available to the public through the Meteorological Service of Canada. This service dates as far back as the 1870s.

As a scientific department, Environment Canada is a heavy data generator, not only in weather monitoring, forecasting, and research, but also in subject areas related to biodiversity; ecosystem monitoring; air, water, and ground pollution; and climate change.

Our scientists have a culture of sharing data and an expectation that through collaboration with others they will leverage the value of their research, generate discussion, and expand their knowledge. In addition, Environment Canada has a responsibility to provide information in a timely manner to citizens to protect their health and safety.

Therefore, Environment Canada already supports open data, as evidenced by the 503 data-related resources available on existing public websites run by Environment Canada. Via these websites, applicable environmental data--for example, weather, climate, or hydrology data--are made available free of charge to Canadians. A number of these sites are already configured to provide data in raw machine-readable formats, which means that the data can be easily read by other computer systems.

Weather data, is a vital resource with high economic impact, are made available free of charge to citizens and businesses—a point, I believe, David Eaves effectively addressed during his appearance here last Monday. Weather data are used daily by citizens, airlines, transport companies, farmers, municipalities, electricity generating companies, utility companies, and forestry firms. This information enhances their decision-making in response to changing weather, water, and climatic conditions.

Approximately 50% of all visits to Government of Canada websites come to Environment Canada. Our most popular website is weatheroffice.gc.ca. This past November, the site responded to 42.3 million visits, representing 1.2 billion hits, with users downloading 11 terabytes of information. Visitors were primarily looking for their local weather forecasts and weather radar data, as well as provincial summaries. The most popular areas visited were the 800-plus city pages; local, regional, and national radar; RSS feeds; and weather warnings.

For the more specialized scientific needs of Canadian industry, including the value-added meteorology or VAM sector, the academic community, and international peers, Environment Canada offers a data distribution service at dd.weatheroffice.gc.ca. This provides 24/7 access to numerical weather prediction models, real-time radar data, city page information in xml format, and all weather-related text products produced by Environment Canada. Throughout 2010, this site responded to an average of 6.6 million visits per month, comprising 132.2 million hits, and serving up 3.2 terabytes of information.

In addition to weather observations and satellite and radar imagery, a wide array of other public information--such as water levels, air quality, and weather forecasts for the public and marine communities--is also available online.

Another important data set is the national pollutant release inventory, or NPRI, which is Canada's legislated publicly accessible inventory of pollutant releases to air, water, and land; of disposals; and of transfers for recycling. I believe you have already heard previous testimony from other witnesses explaining how private citizens have recently used this NPRI data to create a web-based, zoomable map presentation of pollutants released by location within Canada.

For a chief information officer, there are a number of considerations in the technical implementation of data publishing on websites open to the public. For example, we need to have policies, directives, standards, and guidance in place for implementation of open data covering access to information, security, accessibility, official languages, etc., and ensure that these are respected during system implementation.

We also need to enforce the use of well-structured data and of solid record management. We need to have a well-defined architecture that is scalable, flexible, and standardized. We need to ensure application of open data principles and future systems development and implementation. We need to identify and reserve any needed ongoing maintenance costs. We need to have a realistic schedule for implementation in terms of resource and requirements. Finally, we need to assess the cost, feasibility, and value of migrating existing data sets or information to open data formats.

It is worth noting that continuing advances in computer and telecommunications technologies have made sharing and processing of information easy and affordable in comparison to older methods. The pace of innovation has been and will continue to be rapid, enabled by technology and fueled by easy access to information.

In historical perspective, the first-ever email in Canada was only in 1985. The first-ever web browser in the world became operational in 1992. Facebook has only been around since 2004, and Twitter since 2006.

Further in the future, there are other increasingly important considerations, notably the requirement for machine-readable formats, which enable machine-to-machine communications.

In closing, I will say that Environment Canada has been a leader in the domain of providing data openly and freely. We remain committed to continued leadership and to ensuring that the public has access to Environment Canada data.

I'm delighted to have been invited and I look forward to your questions.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Mr. Shawcross. We're now going to start the first roundof questions. We will have seven minutes each.

Please go ahead, Dr. Bennett. You have seven minutes.

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

Thank you very much. It's great for you to come and give us an update on the progress.

I think you won't be surprised by this first question. Is there really an open government strategy for the government? If so, could you table it with us in terms of what, by when, and how?

Everything we've heard is that unless it really comes from the top that “thou shalt be open”, that nothing seems to happen. I think we're a little concerned that without a real strategy--what, by when, and how--we're not getting anywhere.

I think we're a little concerned that the Government Information Quarterly says that we were the best in the parliamentary democracies and are now the worst. As well, the OECD paper from last November, in the chapter on Canada, states that in the fall of 2010 there will be a launch of a new portal providing one-stop access to federal data, a single window, yada yada, but it also says we are “exploring the development of open data policies”.

Does this mean we do not have an open data policy? When can we expect the single portal, which the OECD document says was going to be last fall?

[Corinne Charette]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. There were a number of questions, so let me just try to take them one by one.

Yes, we have been working on an open data portal. We have been inspired, in fact, by the good work and the significant experience of colleagues at NRCan and Environment with their data sets, as well as the terrific response they have had and the experience they have in making this information available.

We did start working on this open data portal early in the fall, towards late summer. At first we were perhaps overly optimistic as to our speed of delivery.

We had hoped to be in a position to come up with a one-stop access that would allow us to consolidate data sets in machine-readable format from a number of departments and make them more easily findable by Canadians for the purpose of reusing.

As we did this work, we uncovered the fact that there are departments making quite a bit of information available from their individual websites. Not all the data is in machine-readable format, so while it's accessible from individual department websites, it's accessible mostly from a read perspective--i.e., I can read it online or print it out and read it--but it is not in the machine-readable format that would allow people to download it and use it in applications and so on. We started to delve into what would be involved in making a greater number of data sets available in this form.

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

But is there a Treasury Board policy that “Thou shalt have all your data in machine-readable format, and in 30 days”?

A strategy is what, by when, and how. What we learned from the municipalities is they actually were able to do this pretty quickly--put up a single portal, populate it with the easy stuff first, and then keep going. I don't know what the holdup is.

[Corinne Charette]

Well, there is no existing policy that says, “Thou shalt put all your data up in machine-readable format”, but that's exactly what we've been working on, and the—

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

So you're saying there is no open data government policy for the Government of Canada?

[Corinne Charette]

Open government in...?

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

No, I mean open data. Here it says, “exploring the development of open data policies”. That means there isn't one.

[Corinne Charette]

There is an access to information policy and there is an information management policy, but an open data policy that specifically says departments that publish data on their websites must do so in machine-readable format is not currently developed. We are working on it. It has a number of ramifications.

For instance, if we take other departments—not including NRCan or Environment, which have a long and successful history—most departments that publish data don't necessarily publish what we call the metadata with it. The metadata has to be crisp, has to be to standard form, and has to be bilingual, so that when downloading, computers can easily reuse this data. Otherwise we're downloading data that couldn't really be interpreted or used properly by any programmer or computer.

We're looking at the implications of doing that. In a period of fiscal constraint, how can we do that so that departments can release more and more data in machine-readable formats without having undue financial burdens placed upon them in a time where they're asked to do quite a bit more?

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

I thought there was going to be a release last fall on a digital economy policy for the government. It seems what we've been hearing is that we're just falling farther and farther behind, in that when the U.K. put its data up, it added £8 billion to their economy.

Obviously these are the deux étoiles of the government, and I thank them. I am thrilled at the cottage to be able to go on your website and find out whether I need my boots or not. It's fantastic.

However, what are the laggard departments and what does the government do about the laggard departments? If there's not a policy, how on earth do you encourage the other departments to get going on this?

[Corinne Charette]

I would say that departments are making an awful lot of data available online to the public, in either PDF or standard web format. Departments, I think, are publishing—

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

But they don't want PDF. Nobody wants PDF--nobody. You can't search PDF--

[Corinne Charette]

That is true--

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

--so that's not on. Can they stop doing PDF?

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

The seven-minute period is up, and we'll have one speaker, please.

The person who has the microphone right now is Madame Charette.

Go ahead, Madame Charette.

[Corinne Charette]

Departments are making quite a wealth of information available online. Not all of the information is in data sets that can be repurposed by computers. Obviously NRCan and Environment are both departments with a lot of numerical data. There are other departments with numerical data, and we are working with them to assess the implications of their making metadata available, which is a prerequisite to making this available in machine-readable format--translating their metadata and ensuring that they are able to publish both in that format as well as the format that their current website visitors and citizens are accessing and want to continue to access today.

It is actually important and an area of great interest. We have a lot of collaboration from different departments, but we have quite a wealth of information published online and we're determining what are the priorities, what should we move to, how can we respect our official languages, and how can we do our information management within cost-control environments. We're making good progress.

Yes, we thought we would be ready in the fall, but as we continue to work, we know that we've made good progress. We are hopeful. We're advancing quite a bit and we're confident that when we are ready, we will be able to provide a product of value, but we don't want to set expectations that we can't meet. We're being thoughtful and careful; we have to work through all of our policy areas.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Dr. Bennett.

We're going to move now to Madame Freeman.

Madame Freeman, you have seven minutes.