The City of Montreal has made progress with public consultation. As I said earlier, there are various standing committees on public consultation. The last two I have heard talked about open data.
But I would like to come back to the language problem. Quebec municipalities are probably not as affected by the language problem because Quebec’s public language is French. The municipalities write their documents in French. Of course, we also distribute some documents in both languages, and even in other languages. That is why translating data to make it open to the public does not apply to us. It's different in Quebec.
We need to really understand that, when it comes to open data, a distinction has to be made between an interface for distributing data and the data themselves. Numbers and even interviews can still be shown and made public even if they are not translated. There are also tools for automatic translation if there is an urgent need for access. It is a matter of quality, and quality is never perfect.
I was telling you earlier about information overload. That is something that public administrations are coming up against. They are afraid to act and find a variety of excuses not to go forward.
It is important to give the public accurate and timely information. If it takes five months to translate a document, it is no longer timely.
That’s what I had to say.