Good afternoon, everybody.
Mr. Eaves, I'll start with you first because you are living in the town where I also went to school. I went to Northeastern, in Boston, so let's start with you.
You brought up the concept of platform government. If we leave privacy aside for a moment and we look at the core infrastructure, which I think is an important way to recognize what is really involved, as you know, as a developed country we don't have any greenfields as Estonia does. It received its independence and it basically started from scratch. To some extent, part of India, depending on where you look, was also greenfielded. But we are an advanced country. We have advanced systems—systems that have been in place for 20 or 30 years. We have a way of doing business, and certain protocols.
However, when we look at Estonia, it's a unitary government, and there are only 1.3 million people. In Canada we have two issues. We have cross-department sharing of information, and also, because of the system of our federalism, each level of government controls different pieces of information. You have the x road in Estonia that goes across one level of government with separate databases, but here, in some cases.... Where I'm from, the Waterloo region, we have four levels of government: municipal, regional, provincial and federal.
When you talk about this infrastructure, and if we use the Estonia model, in which all information is not housed in one database but spread across multiple databases, which would also incur a certain level of security, how do we do it in Canada, where you have four different levels of government with four different core responsibilities?