I think there are numerous examples and I don't say this to pick on this particular government. As previously said, all governments get cautious around sharing data and information. One of the reasons we have a competitive political process is to keep people honest.
There are two points I'd love to make.
One is I think there are all sorts of macro examples. For example, people were curious about the F-35 spending. Parliament demanded documents, and then those documents were produced in 100 boxes and printed out. What this meant is that if you were someone who was actually interested in learning anything about this, you couldn't do keyword searches of that. You'd actually have to go through and read every single piece of paper. This is what we call hiding things by making them available but in formats that are completely useless or very hard to use.
I think those types of behaviours are examples of a government where they're not actually interested in transparency and they're certainly not actually interested in sharing information. I'd be looking for ways that we could curtail governments from doing that in the future, so when I ask for a document, I get it in a machine-readable way so I can do keyword searches and go and find the interesting things.
I'd love to see more around actual budget data being made available for downloads, so that people can actually.... How do we make the government more legible to the population so they can see where money's getting spent and they can see how their tax dollars are being used? I think all governments have a long way to go, but we, in particular, have a long way to go. And the U.K. is actually a very interesting example around this. They've made all spending data down to £500 downloadable and publicly available. So you can actually go and see how each department is spending its money. This has been interesting to the public, but I think it's actually been very interesting even to the people in government, because they can actually now access how the money's being spent in a very direct way. Their staff can, and they can do their own analysis.
I think even government officials, elected officials, have found this dataset to be very interesting.
Another example would be the access to information requests. I see no reason that when someone makes an access to information request, that document is not being put in a publicly available database so that if I now want to do the same access to information request, I'm not going through the whole thing all over again. I can go and scan the ones that have already been done and you can save me a whole bunch of time, but more importantly, you can save government and taxpayers a whole bunch of time by not having people running around and gathering up the same documents and doing the same assessment all over again. I think it's in everybody's interest to make that happen.
So those are cumulatively the things that I would say. At a high level, a recommendation that you could make.... One of recommendations we made in Ontario with the open government task force was actually creating rules around procurement. So you say any system that is bought by this government that is going to produce data must have in its procurement demands, as part of the specifications, the ability to extract that data easily. So if someone comes along and asks for something, there's no longer this question of, “Oh, well, the system's old or it's hard to use and we can't extract it.” We've actually built that in as a requirement so we make it easy to extract information.
Changing procurement rules is one of the most powerful tools that you have at your disposal to think about how we can make data more accessible to people.