Evidence of meeting #24 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was information.
A video is available from Parliament.
Executive Director, Citizen Engagement, Government Communications and Public Engagement, British Columbia Government
I'm certainly delighted whenever the federal government can take the lead on a complicated policy issue. Certainly at the provincial level, we're struggling with this. I think it has been one of the challenges around implementing open data within our organization. There's a view that really high-value data has to do with personal information—health data, for example. But there's no real way to publish that.
I think we should be able to get to a place where we understand that with aggregate levels of information, the practices around that anonymization are very clear and well understood across the country. It would be very helpful for the federal government in its work and our collective privacy commissioners across the country to talk to us about that.
Conservative
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
On that theme of what the federal government can do to assist, if you had an open portal, are there any other asks that you would have, any type of leadership role that you would like the federal government to assume that could really advance the cause of open data in Canada? Is there anything else you'd want to fill into the blank?
We'll start with you, Mr. Hume, and then Madame Nadeau.
Executive Director, Citizen Engagement, Government Communications and Public Engagement, British Columbia Government
I certainly think the strength of the open data conversation has been the emphasis on getting us moving on publishing data. I think the weakness has been that it has seemed to focus us on a lot of technical issues—data licensing, data standards, and those kinds of elements.
The direction that the U.K. is heading in is the idea of data capability, that is, a national data infrastructure. We have made a lot of investments in such things as spatial data infrastructure, and that clearly has been led by the federal government through its GeoConnections program. For federal leadership, the idea of building skills around data analysis, data publishing, data management, and the opportunity for us to build the systems, the ideas, and the insights out of data could be a real focus as far as skills development and economic growth are concerned.
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
Could you elaborate how the federal government could build the skill base?
Executive Director, Citizen Engagement, Government Communications and Public Engagement, British Columbia Government
It has a number of different mechanisms at its disposal. One area is academic funding; that could be a focus. Training initiatives through Employment and Skills Development Canada offer another. There are also the labour market agreements with the provinces, other relationships with post-secondary institutions, and simply leading the conversation with the business community and rallying the tech community and driving this as an element in Canada's overall approach to the digital economy or knowledge-based government—whatever kind of wrapper you would want to put around it.
Those routes would be open. Access to data is a fundamental part of it, but it isn't sufficient. Skills, insight, and the ability to use the data describe the direction in which we really need to go.
Chief Information Strategist, Office of the Chief Information Officer, Government of New Brunswick
With the open portal, as I said in my script, having access to standards.... Just having the Government of New Brunswick trying to find out all of the different standards we should have, analyze them, and use them, is a huge project. Why should we do this, when all of the governments in Canada need to do it? That's why I'm saying we should do this in a collaborative way, so that New Brunswick does some, British Columbia does some, the federal government does some, and we all collaborate so that we can reuse the research.
It would be great if eventually the industry creates apps and can ingest data with great agility across the country. That means never having to transform the data: they just ingest it and they can use it right away. This is a great advantage.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pierre-Luc Dusseault
Thank you, Mr. Byrne.
I thank our two guests for taking part in this meeting and for sharing their expertise with us. It will certainly help us continue our study.
The bell is telling us that we have to go to the House to vote, so we are going to adjourn this meeting.
Since we did not have time to look at future business, let me remind the members from all parties to start thinking of a list of witnesses for the next study. I will not say any more because we have to go vote now.
The meeting is adjourned.
