Government Operations Committee on April 29th, 2014

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Order, please. Good morning, everyone. We are going to begin our 21st hearing.

We have several guests with us, and I thank them for being here.

Today we are continuing our study of the government's open data practices. We have the good fortune of having some representatives, who are mainly from Ontario. The first to make a presentation will be Mr. McKerlie, Deputy Minister, Open Government, Ministry of Government Services, Government of Ontario. He is accompanied by Mr. Foulon. Afterwards we will hear from a representative of the City of Ottawa, Mr. Giggey, as well as a representative from the City of Toronto, Mr. Low. We shall also be hearing from Mr. Lenihan, as an individual, who will also make a presentation. Afterwards, as is our usual practice, the members of the committee will have questions for the witnesses.

Thank you once again for being here.

We will begin immediately with Mr. McKerlie, from the Government of Ontario.

Thank you for having taken the trouble to travel here. I know that you have just gotten off the plane, so thank you again for being here with us.

[Ron McKerlie, Deputy Minister, Open Government, Ministry of Government Services, Government of Ontario]

Thank you very much.

Good morning. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today.

My name is Ron McKerlie. I'm the deputy minister of open government in the Ministry of Government Services in the Ontario public service, and with me today is Marc Foulon. Marc is the head of the open government project for the central agencies I and IT cluster.

Our open government office was created just 10 months ago, so we're fairly new to the business of open government and open data. It started in June 2013. At that time we started shaping the vision for open government in Ontario. We brought Marc on soon after to help lay the groundwork within our ministries and within the I and IT organization, particularly around the area of open data.

On October 21, 2013, Premier Kathleen Wynne publicly announced Ontario's commitment to open government. She penned a letter at that time to the public in which she wrote, “Our Open Government initiative will help create the transparent, accessible government the people of Ontario deserve.”

It was at that time that she also committed to having each ministry craft an action plan on how they would pursue the open government agenda. She also introduced the open government engagement team chaired by Don Lenihan of the Public Policy Forum, and I'm delighted to see Don is here today as well.

The open government work that we're doing now falls into four broad streams. The first is open dialogue, which means increasing opportunities for the public to provide informed and meaningful input on legislation, on policies, and on programs that affect them. The second is open information, which means making government information normally only available through the freedom of information process available to the public on a proactive and ongoing basis. The third is open data, which means making government data available in a machine-readable format and covered by a common open licence so that people and businesses can access it, can utilize it, and can repurpose it to develop new ideas, new services, new applications, and hopefully jobs.

The fourth is accountability, which involves a number of legislative and non-legislative issues and items that would strengthen political accountability, enhance oversight, particularly with our agencies, boards, and commissions, and increase transparency across government and the broader public sector. The public sector and MPP accountability and transparency act, 2014, was brought before Ontario's legislature on March 24 and is currently in its second reading debate.

Of the four streams Ontario is pursuing, open data is the most mature. In November 2012, we launched our open data catalogue, which currently has over 175 data sets, such as energy consumption for the Ontario public service and the broader public sector, Ontario research funding details, greenhouse gases and pollution emissions, and Ontario library statistics, to name just a few. All are publicly accessible online.

One of the first goals of the open government office was to create an inventory of the data sets held by the Ontario public service, and working together with ministries, we have identified over 1,000 of these data sets. We have now posted them online and they're available with a voting tool for the people of Ontario. We've since shared our inventory collection process and guidelines with the provinces of B.C. and Alberta, and with numerous Ontario municipalities and regions. We don't have the resources to make all of our online data available in an open format immediately, but we also wanted to ensure that we pursue a quality over quantity approach, which is why we considered the voting tool and how we would release it to the public.

In the first 24 hours, over 10,000 votes were registered on different data sets, and we have more than doubled that in the first week that this voting tool has been available to the public. Ontario is the first government in Canada to encourage and empower the public in this way and there's been a great deal of interest in telling us which data sets are most valuable to them.

Another key piece of our work on open data has been to introduce a common licence on our data sets. Data released under a common licence becomes even more valuable because people can more easily use and combine data from any source that uses this licence. Ontario worked with the federal government, with Alberta, and with British Columbia to create the licence and we have adopted it for all published data sets from June 2013 onwards. Since then numerous municipalities across Canada have adopted this licence, including the City of Toronto, and we are continuing to encourage other Ontario municipalities and regions to use this licence as well.

Ontario has also been committed to building relationships with the developer and the research communities. We've hosted a number of events to get developers thinking about how they can use our data and how we can support them in doing that. Industry data owners have also attended these events in order to help developers understand the nuances of the data. Developers are one of the key audiences for open data. They're the ones who build new applications using the data, and we value their enthusiasm and support.

In late March, we received the open government engagement team report. The team spent the early winter travelling around the province, engaging the public, elected officials, public servants, and journalists on how they want to see government done differently. The report, entitled “Open by Default: A new way forward for Ontario”, includes 17 recommendations, such as improving the freedom of information framework, launching a one-stop open government platform, and other things that would help consolidate information for all public engagement initiatives across the province. We have been reviewing the report, and we're preparing a response that will go forward shortly to government.

One of the recommendations they made was to implement an “open by default” data policy in the OPS, and the development of this open data policy is now under way.

The open by default concept has several tenets to it. The first is that we would publish all government data in commonly accepted open standards unless there are privacy, security, or legal reasons not to do so. It would also mean publishing data in a timely manner, with the highest level of detail possible and in a machine-readable format. It would mean making data available free of charge in non-proprietary or commonly adopted formats. It would mean ensuring that no data is destroyed. It would mean waiving intellectual property for data that the government collects or creates and ensuring we don't transfer intellectual property of data to a third party. It would mean extending these open by default principles to agencies and to our broader public sector organizations when renewing existing governance agreements.

We're in the process of drafting an open data directive that would support this open by default approach in the public service and in our classified agencies. The directive will define key principles and requirements on publishing open data. It will define data that is exempt from disclosure due to privacy and confidentiality or security reasons, and it will promote a culture of openness and collaboration, both within the public service and externally, to the people of Ontario.

The key principles that Ontario will commit to under this directive are comprehensive. The first and primary principle of the directive is that government data that is not exempted by this directive will be made open by default, as understood by the tenets I previously spoke to.

The second is that government data must be accessible to the public via the Internet in a machine-readable format, at no cost and under an open licence with few restrictions. It will also direct data stewards to prioritize the release of high-valued data as defined by public demand and government priorities. We will commit, to the extent possible, to releasing data in its original unmodified form and at a level of granularity that will not compromise privacy and privilege, confidentiality, and security of government data.

Finally, we will apply detailed data quality guidelines to ensure that any government data released is complete, accessible, fully described, and timely.

This directive will provide a strong foundation for the Province of Ontario to build a policy process aimed at implementing a 21st century open government organization, and will be one of the most comprehensive data directives in place anywhere today.

Ontario is focused on strengthening partnerships with other levels of government. We are very motivated to participate in the delivery of a national data set search capability, for instance. We believe this will be of great value to public servants, the research community, and developers, as well as to the general public. A federated search functionally for Canadian governments, including federal, provincial, and municipal, would help the adoption and use of open data by improving access.

I also believe that we should be pursuing common standards and principles around open data. Interoperability in data standards and how we release it between the platforms we use is more than a technical exercise. It's about building value for users and ensuring that all levels of government work together to provide citizens with a seamless experience of government.

We also need to describe our data with comparable metadata standards so that policy-makers, researchers, and citizens can tell if a particular data set is relevant to their questions or if they are comparing apples to apples. We need to release our data in compatible file formats, under a compatible licence, and with a relatively similar user experience. Otherwise, only a few very technical individuals will have the time, skills, and resources to extract, convert, and even find the data they need to start a project or test an idea.

Common standards and interoperability are not a “nice to have” but a strategic requirement needed to do public policy and to tackle with citizens, based on evidence, the complex and very real policy problems we're facing.

This is why we’re happy to be participating in the new open data Canadian leadership forum, and the open data and information working group. Working together on these common goals will open up more possibilities for both our governments and our citizens.

We're obviously very proud of the work that Ontario has accomplished in a very short time. We came to the game a little bit late but we've been persistent and dedicated in our efforts since then and I believe our achievements speak for themselves.

I also believe that there are still many very exciting potential opportunities for Canada to emerge as a leader in the open data space. By working together and alongside other levels of government, I believe we can create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. By working together, by developing an agreed-to set of standards and protocols, by making search easier, and by supporting the developer community, I believe we can become global leaders in open government and open data.

Thank you very much for your time and attention. Marc and I look forward to answering your questions.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. McKerlie.

Thank you very much for your presentation

We are now going to continue with Mr. Giggey, for 10 minutes.

Thank you for your presence before the committee today. You have the floor.

[Robert Giggey, Open Data Lead, City of Ottawa]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for inviting the City of Ottawa and for inviting me to speak today. I've been running the open data program at the city for the last three to four years. To give you a bit of history, I've been working in the municipal IT sector for the last five or six years. I've served on several boards that have been working with open data, and we've been partnering together with other cities. Four of the larger cities, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Ottawa, have been collaborating on open data for the last three years. As well, there is now a provincial open data group that's working together that I've been participating in. The municipal IT associations have created special interest groups around open data that I'm participating in as well.

Just to give some background, and the city plays host to you so you are aware, we are the fourth-largest city in Canada but largest by land mass for the big cities. We have 17,000-plus employees and a $2.5-billion operating budget. That gives you a sense of comparison, I guess, with the other cities. We're trying to be representative of the cities and how we use open data, and maybe can reflect those.

For the city itself, we initiated open data through a review. We were requested to review our data dissemination policy. Before “open data” took hold as a common term, we were simply looking at mimicking what some of the private sector was doing. Could the city leverage the release of data to tap into primarily the local technology sector to see if it would support them in building solutions for the city, but also to encourage innovation based on what we were seeing from local developers?

We launched in 2010. Our launch was fairly quick and simple. We simply started to put up easy-to-release data sets. For a city, that's pools, park locations, and facilities, stuff that's very common sense to put up. We immediately launched an application development contest to make use of the data, to create awareness, to have people involved, and to start gaining some of the benefits of having the data available.

For the first few years, our focus was on community engagement. That's ongoing. We've continued to do that. It's a critical part. I think any jurisdiction that has gone forward with open data has seen the tremendous value of reaching out to those who use the data. Because the topic itself and the skills required to use the data aren't necessarily in the greater population, you want to reach out to those who can create stuff with it and help deliver the value to the residents or citizens.

Along those lines, we've hosted many events in the city—hackfest may be a term you've heard—where we bring members of the community together. We bring staff along, and we try to encourage the development of applications or services or research based on not only the needs of the city but also what the community groups are interested in. We're on hand to be the experts around the data itself, with the intent that we can focus on being good data providers, of running that and of having good-quality clean data and understanding the topics, but they can help deliver what's of value to the community based on their own needs, or reaching out whether from a profit motive or for community engagement or community development.

We have run several contests along the way that have been successful with Apps4Ottawa. We'll probably be looking to doing a third one in the not-too-distant future. These are useful activities in terms of not only gaining the attention of the public, who do benefit from the outcomes of it, but also reaching out to a broad set of users of the data, going beyond application developers into academics and researchers. It's getting students involved, students in universities and high schools, so that from an early age they can see that open data exists and there's value in it. It can help lead them to greater community engagement, get them involved with their cities and with government, and get them interested in doing their part to contribute to society.

We have had many successes along the way. One of the great things, as we've seen, is that when we launched the open data program we spoke of the benefits that we were hoping to see but we've actually now attained them so it's no longer just theoretical. We have proven cases where open data has shown its value manyfold over. For the cities, we are lucky in a way because we have so many front-line services to deliver and it's very amenable to, say, front-line applications that the public can use. We've seen tremendous benefit whether that's around recreation, transit, traffic, garbage, or recycling. The benefits we see are cost reduction from us not having to develop solutions but also driving new revenue from the city to getting more people to using our recreation programs, our cultural programs, and doing it without further investment from the city.

Finally, one of the most recent developments is a new routine disclosure and proactive dissemination policy that the city has adopted. This is in line with the direction that the Province of Ontario has moved in and aligns with the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario with their access by design. This allows the city, moving beyond open data—it can include open data but what information should the city be proactively disclosing for the same purposes?—to have the information available to the public, to the community groups, to associations and researchers, so they can create the value from it as well as promote transparency and accountability.

I would like to use this time to suggest several recommendations from the point of view of a municipality working around open data of where we would like to see the federal government move or opportunities for them to adopt.

The first is around a common data and it's for the provinces as well. Looking at many of the topics, whether transportation, health, environment, education, governance, or spending, for people to have the complete picture they need the data from all three levels of government and I think the federal government is in a good position to help drive that forward and promote the release from the three levels of government.

The second is around federated data. There would be seemingly tremendous value in having a single place of access for data sets. So if we were all releasing transportation, environmental, or health data, if there were one place to access that data, it would make it more accessible to more users and the federal government's portal could serve as that place. So not only would cities release their data on their sites but they could also be releasing them through the federal portal to simply make it easier to access.

I think the federal government is in a good position to help promote standards for interoperability and policy. I think they've done that through the release of the common licence that they've been promoting which is, in itself, of tremendous value in enabling many people to participate and use open data. I think there's more that can be done in this area specifically around data standards but also in promoting formats that will support interoperability. This is so that data from all the many jurisdictions can be more easily used by those who choose to use it.

The final point is around close engagement with the municipalities. There is, obviously, a separation between the federal government, the provinces, and the cities. There are formal processes in place to help with that collaboration, such as the Public Sector CIO Council; however, it can be limiting in terms of getting that real collaboration between the three levels. I think, whether it's through the federal portal, through other means, if there's a way to connect, say, the bureaucrats at the federal level to the municipalities directly with the provinces involved, we'll have a better outcome for citizens and users of the data.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to your questions and helping you. Again, I appreciate your inviting us to speak and that you are looking at this topic specifically. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for your presentation and your recommendations.

Without further ado, we are going to hear from Mr. Low, who is the Manager of the Social Research Unit for the City of Toronto.

You have 10 minutes.

[Harvey Low, Manager, Social Research Unit, Toronto Social Development, Finance and Administration Division, City of Toronto]

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for having me.

If I could just ask you to talk to Environment Canada to change the weather out there, I'd appreciate that. That's my first ask.

I'd like to break down my comments into two main sections. First is a little bit about the history of open data and open government at the City of Toronto and some lessons learned that might help you. Second, I'd like to address the key questions that you've asked of me in terms of our response and input into the federal data portal.

Just briefly, my name is Harvey Low. I'm the research manager of the social research unit at the City of Toronto. In 2012, I was the OGP representative down in Brazil on behalf of Canadian civil society and Canadian municipalities. I am currently the chair of the city's research committee, and the human services cluster representative on our open government committee. The city has an open government committee, actually.

We have learned some lessons at the city. We've been in the open data game since about 2010. As Robert mentioned, I'm one of the original four. We have an open data site, and now the city has actually moved to multiple portals for access to free data. Essentially we have not just the open data site, which has about 110 data sets up there, if my count is correct, but also an application called Wellbeing Toronto. It's an online mapping application that provides an additional 200 to 300 variables, many of which are from federal and provincial data sets that have been long in coming. So I agree with Robert that if there is a way the federal government can help us stickhandle and manage access to both provincial and federal data, that would be wonderful.

I am also on the steering committee of the Canadian Council on Social Development's community data program. For those of you who are unaware of that program, that was formed about eight years ago, with 22 Canadian municipalities, to get easier and low-cost access to federal data. That's been going on, as I said, for eight to ten years.

One thing we've learned at the city is that it's not always wise to simply release data sets without context. I'll speak to that in a little bit more detail.

We want to make sure that a website that is open to the public also has a context explaining what all those data sets are about. Typically users out there are of a common profile for open data sites. They are usually more technically savvy, younger in age, and very competent in the area of social media.

The first question you asked us was how we compare to other municipalities and how we meet the needs of Canadians. You asked about how we become accountable and transparent while maintaining privacy. I think another question you asked was how we use the data for very specific issues such as job stimulation.

I'll try to address those now through a couple of key theme areas. The first one is to engage the unengaged. We need to decrease the digital divide. As I mentioned before, typically the users out there are people who are hackers and developers—and that is wonderful—and they're very good at data manipulation. Ron mentioned that a lot of them know how to manoeuvre around data. A lot of them know how to analyze data, and they know how to change formats in data. The common public don't have those skill sets.

I think, in line with the provincial and local municipalities, the federal government also needs to begin to recognize that there are other users of your data out there. You need to engage the unengaged.

Who are those? Well, outside of the developers and hackers, there are cities and municipalities. We need data for very strong, place-based evidence planning. Everything that we do in municipalities is done by neighbourhoods, by place. I'll speak to the issue of geography in a moment. You need to reach out to non-government agencies, community agencies, and those that also use data and analyze data on behalf of the public and the clients they serve. The other area of engagement is of non-traditional users of open data sites: professional organizations. They are sitting on a landmine of information from professional geographers and urban planners. Those associations would recognize the value of consolidated federal data. Of course the last group is the people we serve. These are the at-risk population groups—seniors, new immigrants, youth. Those are the groups that also need the data.

So you need to begin thinking about it not being just about hackathons. While I think hackathons are great, you asked whether we are serving the needs of Canadians. What we've heard in the city is that they need an intermediary. They need an intermediary to take that data, such as that from municipalities or the province, and analyze it on their behalf.

The second thing I'd like to talk about is releasing the relevant. What do I mean by that? You asked how we compare to other jurisdictions. The real question is how we can be better than other jurisdictions.

I did a quick scan of the international federal data sites from the Netherlands to Australia. There is one thing in common with us here in Canada. I went in there pretending to be a common user from the public, and I wanted to type in an issue area. We talked about job stimulus. I typed in “unemployment” and I came up with—and I hope I'm not putting out anyone from Australia—zero on the Australian site, zero on the Netherlands' site, zero on the U.K. site. People search by issue areas. The search engines that we have out there...and I'm glad, Ron, that you mentioned we need a national search engine, because that's exactly what we need. We need a better way to tag data. Right now, you need to know what that data set is called before you search on it, which is a bit of a problem. The developers will figure it out, but the general public won't.

We operate right now in a local municipality in what we call a shared-service delivery model. We as municipalities work with communities, non-government agencies, in interpreting data on behalf of the public. Why do we need the data? We need data on vital socio-economic data right now about people's economic circumstances, education levels, those types of things. Those types of data sets, while they may be available at federal ministries like CIC and StatsCan, are not connected right now with your data portal. Raw data's in one place, and that's fine. That serves a specific audience, but we need to pay attention to that other audience.

The other thing we need to do is to link and leverage. You asked the question about how data can stimulate job growth, as an example. One way is to begin linking your data portal with the service provider areas in the various ministries across the federal government, and down through the provinces and municipalities. So if somebody goes in there looking for the economic situation of their municipality, their neighbourhood, or Canada, it would be good to have the data in your data portal linked with, say, economic development or the ministries, even if it's a link to their website. Then you're connecting and networking that raw data to a very specific mandate of a particular ministry. If I understand your standing committee, one of your mandates is cross-departmental connection of services for the public. If you just provide data on a raw data site, that will satisfy the hackers and developers, but it may not truly get at providing the services to the public you want as a federal government. That's what I think we're all here for, for all three levels of government.

The other thing we want to do is to make sure we tag the data by thematic areas. To get back to my question and issue about not having sufficient tags when I type in something as simple as “seniors” and “youth”, I'll get summary papers, which is great. We need to provide better tagging and search capabilities on all our websites.

We need to begin thinking about geography. We need to give the gift of geography. We do everything at municipal levels by place. It's wonderful to have statistics at the city level, what StatsCan calls the CSD level, but that level of data we need to be more granular. We need it down at the neighbourhood level. There should be search engines out there that allow users to search by geography, as well as theme. When we look at the data we need, we're going to need unemployment rates, we're going to need health care statistics. Those have to be at a level of granularity that makes it useful for cities in their place-based evidence planning.

The question on privacy can also be solved through geography. We do not have to look at individual data, we aggregate data to a level of geography that allows us to do that aggregation. Right now, you could say we have the Stats Canada site, but as I said before, begin to link the data portal at the federal site with other ministries and their service mandates so when people look at a table they know where to go if they have questions about that data, and if there are interconnections.

One of the ideas is that you look at service delivery from a multiple factors analysis. We call it in social planning, social determinants of health model. That means if a person has an issue with unemployment, and it has to do with health, housing, transportation, all of these things need to be linked. I think there's an opportunity to link your open data site with service providers in the federal ministries, down through the provinces and the City of Toronto.

Robert mentioned that—not the horizontal connection, which is one issue, but the vertical connections between all levels of government. This is because people understand geography. They don't understand jurisdictions. They don't care where the service comes from. They don't care where the data comes from.

Where do we go from here, as a conclusion? We need to be thinking about intergovernmental data sets, not just data out in Victoria or Halifax, or one ministry over in Alberta or a federal ministry. We need to begin thinking about what the public wants and creating data sets that represent intergovernmental service delivery to particular groups.

Thank you for the time, and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for your presentation.

Our last witness is Mr. Lenihan who is the Senior Associate of the Public Policy Forum.

Thank you for being here. You have 10 minutes.

[Dr. Don Lenihan, Senior Associate, Public Policy Forum, As an Individual]

Great. Thank you very much. Merci beaucoup.

First of all, let me thank you for the opportunity to come to speak to you today about some of the work I have been involved in. I guess the reason I'm here, as Ron McKerlie has already said, is that I was the chair of the Ontario government's open government engagement team. We had nine members. We were all from outside government and were asked by the government to go out, travel around the province, and think about the future of open government.

I want to talk a tiny bit about our mandate. In fact, I want to stand back and try to say something from a much more big picture point of view because that's the kind of discussion that we had. We had lots of fine-grained discussions as well. I think Ron has already done an excellent job of saying some of the more important things we had to say about data, so I'm going to stand back and just think about the question of open government and what it actually means for us.

Let me start by saying something about our mandate, and I take it yours, or certainly the Government of Canada's, because there are those three streams as we like to say: open data, open information, and open dialogue, and the Ontario government, when it gave us our mandate, identified those three streams and we thought a lot about this.

First of all, I would say this. My background is that certainly I have lots of experience in e-government and open data, and so on, in the past, but my real interest is in dialogue, collaboration, and engagement. So what am I doing here? Well, it turns out that open dialogue is a really important part of this.

If you look at the Open Government Partnership and I'm sure you all have had lots of discussions around this, like your committee, it's interesting. Ask yourself where most of the focus is around those three streams. Not surprisingly—and this is a good thing, not a bad thing—it turns out that much of it is focused on data. Why is that? Why aren't we talking about information today? Maybe it's your committee's mandate. Why aren't we talking about dialogue today or talking about it only indirectly, although I see a lot of it surfacing in the conversation? I guess what I'd want to say to you—no offence to anybody in the room or outside the room—is that for governments, the easiest thing to do is open data. Guess why? It doesn't really compromise a lot of the traditional forms of governance we have. You don't have to say a lot. You don't have to give away any power. You don't have to open yourself up. There are some risks, and we heard about some of them, but by and large open data is the easiest place to start, and that's a good thing. I'm not opposed to it, folks. It's a great thing.

But what do we need to do after that, or where do we start to go after that? I want to talk just a little about that. It was interesting, our mandate for the open government engagement team was to focus on open government, and in fact, what the government said to us was to spend 60% of our time on open dialogue, 20% on data, and 20% on information. I thought that was really interesting, and the reason they did that was the recognition that it's time we moved the yardsticks on the dialogue piece and began to ask ourselves how do these three things actually fit together and what's the connection between them.

Let me come at this a little bit through the lens of data, and again in a very high level kind of way. First of all, if someone were to ask me, or if I were to ask myself why we would want open data, there are probably at least two very big things that we've heard a fair bit about today. It won't surprise you. We hear about the commercial benefits, right, that if we unlock these natural resources of the future of the information age we will be able to create new products and services, and that's good for the economy and that's good for all of us, and I'm hugely in favour of that.

Another reason, which we probably talk a little less about but we surely have heard about, is evidence-based decision-making. If you want to make good decisions, you need good information, and the availability of data makes that promising and important.

Let me say just a little bit about each of those and the role that dialogue plays in helping us to realize the full potential of open data.

Harvey talked about geography. I want to say a little tiny bit about it as well. You may or may not have heard of the Canadian geomatics round table. It is hosted by Natural Resources Canada, but the geomatics round table is actually quite a remarkable group, a new one. It's developing. It has about 25 or 30 members, and the round table is focused on geomatics information. It's a multi-sectoral partnership. It is a formal partnership or a round table that involves provincial governments, a number of federal departments, NGOs, universities, and a variety of other stakeholders all around the same table.

The basic reason all those people are there is that over the last four or five years it has become increasingly clear that spatial information is hugely important. I think Harvey has done a fabulous job of beginning to point out the complexities of thinking about how we not only need spatial information but also how we're going to use it and what we're going to focus on when we organize and make this available in the future. It's not like there's just something out there called spatial information. It's how we put the stuff together, how we use it, and we can make choices about how we invest our resources and about what's important, whether it's for commercial purposes or other purposes.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for your presentation.

I thank all of you for your very interesting statements.

We will now be moving to a somewhat more interactive part of our meeting, that is to say the period reserved for questions from the members of the committee.

We will begin with Mr. Ravignat.

You have five minutes.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today; we appreciate your presence very much. The presentations were very stimulating.

At the beginning of the federal government's initiative with regard to open government, they were talking about open government writ large. What's interesting about this study right now is that it's a great representation of how they've narrowcasted what an open government is now.

This study we're doing is not about open government. It's about open data, and it's particularly about a portal. In a way it's about congratulating themselves that they went ahead with something concrete. There's nothing wrong with that, but the results are rather small. There are all sorts of reasons for that, which we could get into, but the reasons don't really interest me right now.

I have a very specific question for Mr. Giggey and Mr. Low. The largest municipalities in Canada are represented here, so just a really quick question to the two municipalities. How useful is the data that is now on the open portal of the federal government?

[Robert Giggey]

In a way, I think it is a question for the consumers of the data. Harvey will speak to it as a consumer and his role with the city of how useful that data is to the city itself. I think it goes a long way in identifying the gaps in the data. From my point of view, data has been placed up there across different industries or topic areas of the government. Now we can identify the gaps of what's missing, but that first step needed to be taken.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

But it's not necessarily the data on the portal that is useful but the absence of data that wasn't put on the portal that is useful.

[Robert Giggey]

I think it does serve a purpose around that, whether it's data standards or formats or the topic itself that's accessible.

I'll let Harvey speak to it.

[Harvey Low]

First of all, I want to congratulate the government. I agree with Don. It's small steps. It's great to have a data portal, but you asked me whether it's relevant, useful. So here goes. I'll give you a candid answer. When I was looking through CivicAccess, an online user group of users of data, I happened on a Twitter trail that said that one of the most popular data sets was caribou trails or migration patterns. I've never seen a caribou in Toronto. I don't know if Robert has seen one in Ottawa.

So there's the whole issue of making sure there are data relevant to social issues. I come from the social realm. Someone on the infrastructure end might talk about transportation data. There are data out there that you've picked, which is great, it's low-hanging fruit, but begin to think about data in terms of what people need, what service agencies need as well. There's that angle.

The other piece, and Don talked about it as well, is geography. The data to us in municipalities is not as useful if it is only at the city or even provincial level as a geographic layer of data. We need data at smaller levels of geography. StatsCan does this already. I'll be technical for a moment. Census tracks, dissemination areas, the geography is there. You have a federal department in StatsCan that has a file that can link and aggregate data to many different levels of geography. Use it. Use StatsCan to bridge that link across federal data sets and provide some of that data at different levels of geography. It'd be meaningful to us and users of geomatics across the board.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

That's great, thank you. I have to stop you there because I have other questions, but that was really helpful.

Maybe more big sky, it was very interesting to hear about the open dialogue piece and the three pillars of open government. I'm looking for best practices. The federal government has done very little on the open dialogue front, not zero, but very little, which in a way has made these data inoperable for a majority. Had there been the open dialogue piece, there would have been an understanding of perhaps what was needed to be put on that portal, in what format it was needed, and how it could be searchable and so forth. There seem to be best practices of the provincial government.

I'd be interested in hearing what the federal government could do more of with regard to open dialogue.

[Ron McKerlie]

One of the things the provinces moved forward with is a consultation directory, which we're about to launch. What it does is provide, in one place, information on all of the opportunities the public had to weigh in on. Policy or discussion or dialogue are issues that the government is interested in hearing the public's opinion on.

It will give them social media ways to ask questions or to offer ideas. It requires a best practice that after we go out and hold these sessions, we document all the learning from that—what we learned from the public—and archive it permanently on this site, so we'll be able to go back every five years when we do a five-year poverty plan to look at what we learned five years ago when we went out and talked to the public.

That consultation directory is developed and ready to go, and it will be evergreen all the time. Every time we think about going out to talk about transit funding, or minimum wage rates, or whatever we're talking to the public about, that will be the first place you will be able to go. You will able to see how long it's open, where the physical sessions are, and what the social media ways of interacting are so that we can listen to what the public has to say.

The other thing we're doing with Don's help is experimenting with some other ways to engage the public rather than the standard: bring everybody into a room, frame the issue, hear what they have to say, thank them, send them away, and then create our own set of policy options and implement them ourselves, and so on.

What we have been trying for over a year now, with Don's leadership, and it has shown some good success to date, is to bring all the vested stakeholders around an issue together and have them own the process, where the government simply sits at the table as a voice. It's challenging because it requires us to give up power. It's challenging because we lose control of the timing of the process, and it's challenging because you have to get groups that might not normally speak together and work together to speak together and work together. But what it has proven is that you get much better solutions, you get much richer dialogue, you get stakeholders who are willing to bend and compromise, and you get much better outcomes.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you. I must stop you here, since Mr. Ravignat's speaking time has expired.

Mr. O'Connor, you have five minutes.

[Gordon O'Connor, Conservative, Carleton—Mississippi Mills, ON]

Good morning, gentlemen.

I've been listening to your briefings, and the basic message I'm getting is that it's not so much the public that is involved in this, it's more like information nerds, or whatever you want to call them, people who are specialized in these areas and can manipulate the data.

In one of our first briefings, members of the government bureaucracy came here. I asked them how they are radiating the information of what they are doing. Essentially the answer was, they are not. They just put it out, and they don't do anything with it.

I'd like each of you, please, to comment on how you would get the information out to the real public who can use this information.

I'll start with Mr. McKerlie.

[Ron McKerlie]

Thank you.

First of all, our experience has shown that the number one users of government data are the public servants in that jurisdiction. Number two are public servants elsewhere. Numbers three and four are developers and researchers.

What we're trying to do is to go out to those communities, specifically talk to those communities—public servants, developers, and researchers—and make them aware. We are connecting them through Twitter and through other online media. We are making them aware when we release data sets so they know exactly what's available and how they can use it. We used the voting tool so we could hear from them in terms of what data they wanted access to, and we are now working together to release the top 25 data sets they had voted on.

[Gordon O'Connor, Conservative, Carleton—Mississippi Mills, ON]

Mr. Giggey.

[Robert Giggey]

Thank you.

I really think open data itself is kind of a nerdy thing, to use your term, so it can only be expected that the biggest users are those who can manipulate it. I think what governments can do is to leverage that.

The point of this is that we typically had released reports, released analysis, showed data aggregated, and provided reports with that. But that's not all of it. People wanted the data so they could do their own analysis and they could come to their own conclusions. In a way, we're going to end up going in a little bit of a circle because we have now released some of the data, at least, to help them along that way. Now the question is being asked: should we not be taking that data and making it into a format that the everyday user can consume?

I think the focus now should be to continue to work on getting data out that's usable and useful across a broad sector. Then depending on what comes out of that and what the users are doing with it, we'll see if there's a gap to make it so that the everyday member of the public can consume that. But we should be reaching out to those who can do it and who can create the value for the end citizen and user.

[Gordon O'Connor, Conservative, Carleton—Mississippi Mills, ON]

Mr. Low.

[Harvey Low]

Open data is not open government. These are terms that should not be used interchangeably.

Maybe the best way to answer your question is to give an example. When we provide a data set through the City of Toronto's open data site.... Let's use a federal source. We just put some data on immigrant landings from the CIC and some other data from income tax files about people's income circumstances. When that data goes on the open data site, that same data is also released through that application I mentioned earlier, Wellbeing Toronto. It's an application that is a tool set. It allows users to look at that data through a different lens. It's a geography lens at neighbourhoods so it's the same data.

This is one place that's raw data and the other place is data in a business context. It's an economy of scale. Don't put it in one place. Put that same data set elsewhere in areas of the city or areas of the federal department where you think that the data would support and give awareness to the public about that service area's mandates. Those are just a couple of examples.

[Dr. Don Lenihan]

I think it's a great question.

I might come at it a little differently. First of all, let me just say this. At least in the short-to-medium term I'm probably maybe a bit like you—I hope I'm not reading this into you—I'm a little skeptical about the likelihood that ordinary Canadians are going to use a whole lot of data sets. I'm not.

There are two things. I think if we want to engage them on this and make it meaningful to them there are probably two other ways we have to come at it. One of course is benefits. If there are really important benefits, it's making the public aware, whether it's economic benefits or better outcomes from government or whatever it may be, so that they see that. I would go even further. I would go back to the engagement question and the dialogue question. I would give them some ownership.

What I mean by that is the more we move down this road and the more we solve the short-term, immediate problems of data management and start to raise the bigger questions of what we want to do with this new resource and what we want to do with coal or oil or something else, people have a view on that. If they start to realize that oil is worth a lot of money and it's going to make them rich or poor or it's going to change the world in which they live, they start caring about how it gets used even if they don't know what oil is made of.

We really might want to start thinking about how to manage and make data more valuable and useful and the benefits to flow. Why wouldn't we ask people what they think we should do with it, because what they say will make a difference? They may not be experts on how to integrate it but they are the experts on what we should get out of it at the end. Is it going to make us better off and how?

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Mrs. Day now has the floor for five minutes.