At the moment, a municipality has to buy the data, and I pay municipal taxes. Provincial and territorial governments also have to buy that data, and I pay provincial or territorial taxes. The federal government and all of their myriad departments and divisions also all have to purchase the same data.
If I go to purchase it, I have to purchase it, and I've already paid for it with my taxes. As well, research organizations such as university libraries on the Data Liberation Initiative also purchase those data. I, as a data user, and with these different organizations that I work with, have purchased the same data at least 10 times, and these are resources that don't diminish with use.
What I'm suggesting is that cost recovery might in fact be more expensive than the cost of sharing the data generally. If you go back and look at Natural Resources Canada and the decisions they've made with GeoGratis, with GeoBase, with the Atlas of Canada, with the geospatial data infrastructure, with topographic maps, etc., they discovered the cost of managing and selling royalties and managing ATIP requests. I think each $5 ATIP request costs $75. Think each time you purchase data about the cost of managing all of that.
What I'm suggesting is that it's incredibly cost-prohibitive to sell us the data that we have already paid for through taxation, and I'm asking that we share back with us our own public data.