Thank you, Chair.
I want to thank the analysts for their reports, which were very helpful, and Madam Freeman for her approaching exhaustive list. That was impressive as well.
I don't have specific proposals, but I think there are things mentioned in the reports the analysts did that merit our attention, and what people said who are specifically attached to those pieces of work.
I think the Australian report and the direction of the Australian government is important, partly for what's noted in the footnote, that Australia has similar copyright laws and a similar copyright framework to Canada. The Information Commissioner mentioned that the other day when she was here as well. We should look at the work the Australians are doing there, the task force report, and the survey that compared Australia to other countries. Maybe if they did a comparison with Canada, that might be instructive to us as well. So I do think that looking at Australia is important.
I'm glad that Madam Freeman talked about the U.S. officials we would visit. I would add the non-governmental organization, OMB Watch—it's mentioned in the report—for their critical look at what's happening in the United States. Apparently there's good stuff happening there, but they also have a critique of that, which I think would be important for us to hear about.
The U.K. action plan that has come from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury also merits attention as a work in progress kind of thing. The report talked about the specific role of the Information Commissioner equivalent in Mexico, who actually runs the whole system for proactive disclosure, which I think is an interesting model. Certainly rather than having individual departments or agencies doing the work, they centralize it. It would be interesting to know how that's functioning and whether that's proving to be an important way to proceed. So I think someone from the commissioner's office in Mexico would be important to hear from.
I also note that the Australian government report talked about consulting with the World Wide Web Consortium on accessibility, to ensure that people with disabilities have access to information provided through proactive disclosure. That's a very specific piece, but it might be helpful to have someone from that consortium present it to us.
Mr. Rickford distributed the letter from Google and Jacob Glick on their interest in open government, open data. I think it would be important to hear from an organization like Google to see how they fit into all of this.
It generally strikes me that there's the sort of policy side dealing with the scope, intent, and goals of proactive disclosure, which I think are really important. We should get clarity on how that would apply to Canada. Maybe we need to hear from Treasury Board again about what they're currently doing around that.
I think there's also the technological side: what technology makes available, what is and isn't possible with the technology, and where technology is going in the future. We need to have some specific representations around technology. I don't know who would do that, but I think that would be an important aspect of what we need to look at.
Thank you, Chair.