Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Bass, for sharing your expertise with us today.
Our committee, as you know, has spent a number of weeks looking at this issue of open government and doing a study of it. We've received some extremely helpful witness information, including yours today, so I thank you for it.
I think you'd find general agreement around this table that we all want to move forward on this. My opposition colleagues today implied that we're not moving forward on it, but I need to set the record clear. Five years ago our government introduced the Accountability Act, and we actually gave access to information from a number of crown corporations that up until then were not open to access to information.
In fact, Mr. Chair, we still have some of these crown corporations dragging their feet.
I do not share the pessimism of my opposition colleagues. I just wanted to get that on the record.
One thing I really appreciate about your testimony today is your presentation of what I would call realistic expectations. Too often we hear that once we open up government and get this data out to the public, everything will be fine. You've presented some very real obstacles that you have faced; you've been honest in indicating that there are still gaps that need to be addressed, and I appreciate that.
On that point of the gaps and the challenges, you highlighted three different areas. One was policy direction and implementation: the policy direction is there, but the implementation has not followed at the proper speed. The third one, you said, was data quality.
I want to come back to the second one, in which you indicated that it is the agency that now decides, if I understood you correctly, what is disclosed. You said this has created a bit of a problem. I wasn't able to follow your line of thinking on that. If you could expand on this point, it would be helpful.