I have about three pieces of advice today. I'm really glad you raised the G-8 because there are some things going on there that I think are quite interesting.
The first thing I would say is that at a very tactical level I worry about some of the ways we might be slipping around our G-8 commitments. In fact, I was very disturbed to realize two months ago that Industry Canada, which shares a database of corporate entities in Canada, used to share who the directors of those corporate entities were. Now the list of those directors goes beyond a $5 pay wall. Rather than being able to see who the corporate directors are, you now have to pay $5 per company. That actually runs contrary to the spirit of the G-8 agreement, which was to make corporate data more transparent to the public.
In fact, if you wanted to spot global corruption, tax evasion, or problems at a corporate level, having a corporate database that is downloadable and accessible is critical to doing that. The G-8 agreed to that, and yet we've gone in the opposite direction. From a tactical place, I would encourage this committee to be looking very closely at Industry Canada's move, to understand why they made this choice.
The second thing I would say is that there is an opportunity in looking at something like corporate data. The opportunity exists in how we harmonize this data across jurisdictions. The question would be on places where we think there's policy importance, corporate transparency, for example. How do we harmonize how we release the data with how the U.K. releases the data, with how the United States releases the data? This would make analysis across jurisdictions much easier, so spotting things like fraud, tax evasion, those types of things, would become significantly easier because the data has all been harmonized.
The third thing I'd say is that if we want to take a leadership role, one of the things that I don't think our G-8 partners are doing, and one of the things that makes everybody in the open data movement very, very nervous, is that there's no protection to our access to most of this data. Our only protection is to do an ATIP request.
If the country wanted to do something that was truly transformational, it would try to figure out whenever it was passing legislation what the core datasets are that make the legislation work. What are the core datasets that allow for the transparency so that the public can assess whether the legislation is working?
The NPRI, which is the data about pollution, is a wonderful example, and that dataset is protected by legislation. Government is required to collect it. It's required to share it, by law, and it is almost unique in that way. I would love to see how we are building datasets that we think are critical to infrastructure or to accountability in this country being protected by law. Users, whether they're corporate or just citizens would know that this data is going to be around—they can actually build infrastructure around it—and they would not be taking enormous risk because the government might get uncomfortable in the future and simply pull that data back the moment it does something that it doesn't like.