Government Operations Committee on March 4th, 2014

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Who is going to catch something?

Let's say that the government department thinks it should be released. We've had cases where ministers' assistants dive into dumpsters or into postal boxes to retrieve an access to information request that the minister decided they had better not release.

Who is supervising what gets put up and released and what is held back under whatever justification the minister might see fit?

Before you answer that, the final question I have is this. What's to prevent the data mining of the users of your new open government portal? We were all horrified to learn that during the interactive tracking of the Aga Khan, whoever signed on is now part of a Conservative Party fundraising mailing list or something.

Who's to stop the data mining of the information of people who use your service now? There are going to be patterns developing. Is the privacy of Canadians who use this portal going to be protected and shielded so that it doesn't get harvested into the SIMS database?

[Corinne Charette]

To answer your last question first, the use and the downloading of these data sets is totally anonymous. That is part of the privacy notice on the site. There are no accounts. You don't have to create an account to download a data set; you can download it, and we do not track that or keep that information. We're very vigilant about that.

In fact, we also have privacy requirements when we get feedback, such that we can only keep the information of the person requesting feedback for enough time to reply, obviously, to the person who may request some information. We have very strict privacy requirements, and the use of the data is totally anonymous.

That is to deal with your last question.

To distinguish between access to information and open data, departments ultimately will determine the speed and the schedule of publishing data sets. This is not access to information. Access to information will still go on; Canadians may still pose an access request. Most access requests are not about machine-readable data. They're usually about reports, documents, memos, etc. Access to information will continue.

We have, in our open government action plan, a few other commitments that support the open information stream of the open government action plan. In particular, since the first version of the plan, Library and Archives Canada have moved on our commitment to declassify and make available—I don't have the exact statistics—almost 10 million pages of information that was formerly classified and not available. That information is now freely available to Canadians through their website. That is in the stream of open information, in addition to the searchable summaries of ATI requests.

We also have another commitment, working towards a virtual library that will allow us to publish more information online in order to avoid unnecessary access to information requests. We're working through these commitments one by one.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

I will now give the floor to Mr. Adler.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have two questions, but I want to preface my questions by making a couple of comments.

First, Mr. Martin talked about ministerial assistants jumping into garbage bins. If he has any evidence of that, I'd like him to present it to the committee.

Second, it is our government that has been the most transparent in Canadian history, and the numbers demonstrate that in and of themselves.

Mr. Martin is playing fast and loose with the figures, but I'd be very interested to know details of any ministerial assistants jumping into dumpsters. If he could table that with the committee, it would be very helpful.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I'd be happy to, Mark. We'll get that information over to you.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

You mentioned earlier, Mr. Walker, round tables that you held. There is no need to be specific in terms of who was around these tables, but I'd be curious to know what types of companies were involved in these discussions.

[Stephen Walker]

Our approach was to work with municipal governments in a variety of individual cities.

In Edmonton for example, we would work with the office of the city clerk. In Edmonton they have quite a robust open data initiative of their own. We asked them, if they would, to help us contact local users—local companies, the post-secondary institutions, civil society organizations, and government representatives as well. We created the widest possible invitation list we could and sent it out and invited them all to come for a day.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

These would be both public sector and private sector institutions. Thank you.

My second question is about the data sets themselves. How are they organized? For example, if I were looking at crime statistics, is there a way of determining by geography, for example, if I'm interested in just a specific geographic area? Would it be possible to mine the data for that kind of information, on either crime statistics or any other kind of data sets, or are there just broad statistics that you have to take with a national perspective?

[Stephen Walker]

There is not one answer to that question.

For a significantly large number of data sets, including the one that we're talking about, there is geo-specific information included into the data set, so that you are able to find which statistics are being applied to which particular area of Canada. We can do that for all of the data sets for which there is some kind of geolocating reference within the data set, which is a large number.

For StatsCan specifically, for example, and for Environment Canada and NRCan, most of this information has some kind of geo-specifying element. So yes, you could map the data across Canada.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

So it is possible. That's interesting. Thank you so much.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Mr. O'Connor.

[Gordon O'Connor]

Thank you very much.

I know these sites are called open data and they're open sites. However, I think also about the security side. Are these sites protected in some security way from hacking? You can have a hacker get in there—we have histories of it—and provide a whole bunch of data that is not open data and it's out into the public. Is there anyway of protecting our system against this kind of thing?

Then I have a second question.

[Stephen Walker]

I think most of the Government of Canada external facing sites are subject to the same protection regime. The protection around data.gc.ca might be a little bit higher than other sites, but it is maintained outside of the firewall, not within the firewall of the Government of Canada. We've been up and running for three years now through the various versions of data.gc.ca and there have been no incidents so far. As Corrine mentioned, we just ran the CODE hackathon over the weekend and we put in place specific protection regime in order to bump it up a little bit, and again there were no incidents.

[Gordon O'Connor]

My other question is about Crown corporations. Are Crown corporations involved in this activity? If they aren't, why aren't they?

[Stephen Walker]

They're included in the request. We have gone out to Crown corporations specifically when a data set has been requested from an external user. Our job is to see whether or not we can actually get that data. We've also sent out general requests for data out to Crown corporations but they won't be covered under the directive on open government.

[Gordon O'Connor]

What you're saying in effect is that you don't have anything from Crown corporations.

[Stephen Walker]

We have a few data sets from Crown corporations now, but we also could conceivably make data available that we have not yet received from Crown corporations.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Would you like to add something, Ms. Charette?

[Corinne Charette]

I would say that Crown corporations are quite collaborative. CMHC has reached out to us and is interested. We haven't put a focus on getting data sets from Crown corporations yet, but certainly that is something that we will work on over this fiscal year to try to expand beyond the government departments and agencies on schedules I and II that are the focus of our information management policy, and directly the focus of the directive. But the Crown corporations are by and large very collaborative as they see value in making their data available to Canadians as well.

[Gordon O'Connor]

Just to respond to that, it would seem to me that Crown corporations are more likely than departments to be the sources of the information that the public wants. They have particular functions that relate to the public and it would seem to me that they should be at the forefront of this information.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for your comments.

Before we move to the third part of the presentation, I will give the floor to Ms. Day.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

I found Mr. Martin's question interesting and relevant. So, I had some fun. I took my iPad, I went on Google and I searched for the words "airports Russia". We know that Russia is a member of the G8 and is often present on the websites. So, by searching, I found airports, a diagram indicating where they are located, a map and colour pictures. There is everything one could want. Basically, there was a lot of information.

I went back to data.gc.ca and I searched for the keywords "airports Russia". It gave me "Haven't found what you are looking for?" and the words "relevance" and "search".

So, with countries that are part of the G8, be they France, Germany or another country, are there links to their data that we can get? If these links are available on Google, why are the hyperlinks not available? Will we have them later? Is it necessary to go through the structure as presented, by entering, for example, the following request: "I am looking for available water quality indicators"?

So it is basically the same question. You told me earlier that if I search in a search engine, like Google or Bing, for something like water, it will bring me to the site. Is the opposite true? If I search for words in the file in question, will it take me to external links that contain the information that I want?

[Sylvain Latour]

At the moment, the answer is no. The Government of Canada portal can only find data from the Government of Canada. However, through our international collaborations and through our national cooperation with the provinces and municipalities, we have discovered that this is something that users want. They have an interest in that.

As such, in the coming years, we will work to create as many links as possible between the different portals as well as between the different access points in order to permit relatively transparent navigation between these sites. At the moment, these sites are grouped by jurisdiction. Currently, our portal only gives access to Government of Canada data.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Are there agreements with the G8?

[Sylvain Latour]

The current agreement with the G8 aims to standardize data and metadata in such a way as to facilitate that sort of thing, but there is no agreement or commitment to create transparent links and navigation between the participating countries' data.