Yes, I keep forgetting the poor ladies back there who are translating.
Excusez-moi, mesdames. Je parle un peu trop vite. Je vais faire de mon mieux.
These research organizations work in universities and communities, and they could all benefit from a more open government and an open data policy. Why? Because they could focus on their research and not focus on trying to find money to pay for public data. They could focus on actually using the data, as opposed to spending 70% of their time—and I really mean it, because I spend a lot of time doing this—trying to find those data in the myriad government institutions we have at all levels of government in Canada.
They could also benefit from that policy by not having to negotiate with public administrators on licensing. It's very difficult to negotiate access to data to do social research and policy research. No one is asking for private data; everyone's asking for aggregated data according to whatever geography they use when they do their area of analysis. If you ever try to negotiate access, in the current context of risk-averseness in the public service, to a public data set that may or may not make a particular minister look good, you will not get access to those data, because there is no overarching policy that guides how public officials should make decisions on the data sets they're using.
We have a number of issues, such as lack of public data standards in terms of formats. In particular, for the community groups I work with, data aggregation is important. The federal government does not have a mandate, it believes, to serve communities, yet that's where we live. We all live in a neighbourhood. We all live in a ward. We all live in a city or a county, and so on. We would ask that data be aggregated according to commonly recognized geographies--that is, according to these different communities as well as to Statistics Canada-recognized geographies and to the geographies of federal electoral districts or health districts.
There are regressive cost recovery policies. We often joke that you have to mortgage the house to study homelessness in Canada. That is deplorable. These are our public data. We have paid for these public data already through taxation. Please fund Statistics Canada in a way that it does not have to sell its public data. Don't make them give their data away free tomorrow, but then not properly fund them to do so. Increase their budget to cover the costs they would no longer recover, and let those public data be available to citizens so that they can do this great work these community groups are doing.
I already mentioned the issue of restrictive and non-interoperable data licensing. I already mentioned to you the lack of data access policies and the absence of data discovery mechanisms, which means that there is no portal and there is no catalogue. You're talking to all these federal departments and crown corporations and agencies. You have to make cold calls, and each time you make a cold call, you talk to at least 20 or 30 people before you find the data set, and then you have to negotiate. Please make those data easier to find; as well, organize them and wrap them in good descriptions with good metadata.
Also, mandate that anybody who receives public research funding in Canada must have a data management strategy. It's deplorable that when Canadian research is done, researchers aren't mandated or financially supported to share their data. This is very simple. CIHR has started to do this; as well, the International Polar Year is an excellent example of one of the first research funding projects that has done that in Canada.
In addition, we're not archiving and preserving our data. Please support the creation of a data archive for Canada. It would just make sense. These are our heritage resources; let's keep them and maintain them for the long term.
Of course, there is a lack of research funding generally on issues related to research around data.
Finally, I'll conclude with some basic recommendations. You can go through the submission in more detail later. I provide you with names of organizations you can consult with and things you can do, but immediately appoint an entity called the chief data officer in each agency and each department. That individual's role and responsibility would be to conduct an inventory in the agency of what those data resources are, who produces them, and how they produce them. The officer would wrap them in all those good open-access and metadata types of principles and data management principles. Then he or she would create a portal so that when researchers and these civil society organizations in Canada do their work, they can call one person, not 50 people, for one data set.
If you think of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities project, that's 200 variables. I spend all my time talking with wonderful public officials on the phone, but I would prefer to do the analysis and write the reports, because that's what helps us Canadians at the end of the day.
I would also suggest developing a catalogue. I would look at the GeoGratis model. I would look at the GeoBase model. I would look at how the geospatial data infrastructure was created, so I would go to Natural Resources Canada, which is an excellent example of how we can consider building an open data infrastructure for Canada. Then I would put all of the best minds of the country together and have them collaboratively work on addressing this issue. I don't think it is only the responsibility of government to do this. I think there are many organizations--in research, the provinces, the territories, all the federal departments, the community, and the private sector--that should help you with this project.
Finally, you should consider more creative and common types of licensing for all of the Government of Canada's data, whether it be administrative data, maps, the census, and so on. New Zealand has done it. England has done it, and so has Australia—all Westminster countries that have crown copyright. We should also be able to do it.
Thank you very much.