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.