Certainly we've seen open government movements internationally, across Canada, and at various levels of government within provinces. I think there's generally a desire and a trend to make more government information available to the citizenry. An informed citizenry is able to participate better in democratic processes and hold government to account, so I am in favour of putting information out there.
I also hear often that the formal request for access process, under the FOIP legislation is onerous. It can be time consuming and it can be expensive. There are possibly ways around that by identifying the kinds of records that individuals or other entities or persons request access to and making that information proactively available. That could vary depending on which public body we're talking about. For example, there are certain kinds of records that are commonly requested from the department of the environment here, and those records have been identified. There has been a lot of work to make that information proactively available to the public so applicants don't have to make formal requests for access. It's just pushed out there. We've seen open government efforts across the country to identify datasets that the public wants to have access to or may be able to use to add value to, so identify those datasets and push them out.
Other than that, things like policies, certain kinds of minutes, those kinds of records that individual applicants request access to, identify them for each public body and push that out there to make it available in a transparent way.