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.