Thank you, Chair, and thank you, witnesses.
I think it is useful to take a minute or two now before we proceed to your main presentations so committee members have a better grasp of the scope of what we're trying to achieve. I still have questions. Just as I think I get it, I realize that I don't quite get it. There's more here than meets the eye. You mentioned the meeting in Northern Ireland where the G-8 members committed to the G-8 open government charter. Is that how you phrase it?
My questions are twofold. First of all, the open data initiative, there is great hope throughout the land among the access and privacy communities that maybe this is it. No more will we be frustrated with access to information requests where it takes a thousand days and costs $10,000 to get a tidbit of information out of the government. It will all be there, and we can simply go and look for it. That's the best case scenario that everyone dreams of if it's true open government.
Who gets to decide what is revealed on the open government portals? Who will do the editorializing? Who will do the redacting, when you black things out? You must have a department of redaction that will be carefully redacting everything that the government doesn't want to release now, surely they didn't want to release then. Who, in your world, does the editing?
Second, Mr. O'Connor hit the nail on the head with his first question, this issue of metadata. I see that the third commitment in the Open Data Charter of the G-8 is to contribute to the G-8 metadata mapping exercise. That's where CSEC comes in. There are 2,200 employees in a building worth $1.2 billion doing this metadata tracking. The budget and the scale of this initiative, if you include how many thousands of employees you have in Treasury Board who are engaged in this, what is your total budget? Why does it take 2,200 employees to track the emails that Canadians send to each other as per our obligation to this G-8 metadata mapping? Maybe you could expand a bit on what our commitment is, too. Are we involved in an international tracking of what everybody is saying to everybody else in the world? Is that what's costing so much money?