Evidence of meeting #26 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 sets.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Chief Information Officer, Chief Information Office and Security Branch, Department of Natural Resources
First of all, it serves the principle of transparency. Ensuring a certain degree of transparency is important, especially when it comes to the mining and extraction sector. It's important to inform Canadians about extraction activities across the country.
Now, as for forestry.
The land mass analysis and what we publish in terms of the—there are technical terms related to this. They really provide companies the opportunity to decide what their business strategy is going to be by way of exploitation in the future. We think those assets are essential and useful for businesses and people as well.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pierre-Luc Dusseault
Thank you.
Mr. Easter, you're out of time.
Ms. Ablonczy, please go ahead for five minutes.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
The CIHR has a lot of data available, but it's not using the open data portal that your sister organization in the U.K., for example, does. I'm wondering why not and if you're moving in that direction.
Vice President, Programs, Canadian Institute for Health Information
The data we hold is provincial and territorial data that comes to us, so we're the custodian of the data. Historically, we've not participated in the open data portal because we're not a federal government department or agency.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Neither are municipalities or provinces, but they're all cooperating.
Vice President, Programs, Canadian Institute for Health Information
We're pleased and interested in cooperating in the portal. It's just that, to date, the way we worked with our jurisdictional partners, we haven't begun to do that yet.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Is there an openness to doing that? I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but as we're trying to direct people to this portal and have a very holistic range of data, if something as important as your organization isn't participating, then people don't have an important piece of the puzzle.
Vice President, Programs, Canadian Institute for Health Information
Absolutely, and not unlike Statistics Canada, I think there's an opportunity to have some sort of a redirect towards the data that's on our website from the portal. I think that would be a good way to perhaps do this efficiently.
Conservative
Vice President, Programs, Canadian Institute for Health Information
I think the answer is yes. We are open to it.
Vice President, Programs, Canadian Institute for Health Information
I'd be happy to explore further what the best means of participating in the portal would be. We are open to participating in the portal.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Okay.
Back to Health Canada, Ms. Montplaisir, you mentioned that you're actively seeking out and soliciting data from areas that have been identified as high value. I wonder if you could expand briefly on that, because I have some other questions.
Chief Information Officer, Corporate Services, Department of Health
The areas of high value were identified, as you know, on the G-8 annex, the G-8 open data agreement annex. So as a result, when these got published, we actually sought out the different program areas within our organization to find out which data sets they had available and what was in a format that could be readily published.
We did find quite a few areas where we've been facing challenges with respect to the format that the data is in and we are continuing to work with these program areas to find technological ways to publish this information as rapidly as Health Canada can.
Conservative
Chief Information Officer, Corporate Services, Department of Health
An example would be with respect to the medical device active licence listing, for instance.
It's an area that is, however, highly dynamic and we believe that it could be better published through an API, an application programming interface, because publishing any of this information in any different way, we would be putting stale data out there and it wouldn't be useful on an ongoing basis.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Okay, that helps a bit.
CIC talks about the work that's being done to make geo-data available through the open portal and I'm wondering if you have a timeline on that. What's the ETA for that addition?
Director General, Research and Evaluation, Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada
As I explained, the source data is personal data—
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Sorry, I asked you the wrong question. That was really for NRCan, I apologize.
Director General, Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing – Geomatics Canada, Earth Sciences Sector, Department of Natural Resources
By default, our data is open, so it's already on the open data portal. We also have geo-based data sets—federal, provincial and territorial—that are available through the geo-based portal. We have annual agreements with the provinces to update them, so they get automatically updated annually in terms of the data sets. We're looking at making new data sets available over the course of the year and I can certainly endeavour to provide information to the committee around when we make new data sets available.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pierre-Luc Dusseault
Thank you, Madam Ablonczy.
Your time is up.
Mr. Ravignat, your turn.
NDP
Mathieu Ravignat NDP Pontiac, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Making data more accessible can result in costs, especially in terms of human resource requirements.
In light of the current fiscal situation, I'd like you to describe the financial challenges you face in making data accessible and the impact they have on your ability to do just that.
With your permission, Mr. Chair, I will ask Mr. Joyce to answer first.
Director, Operations Branch, Statistics Canada
The raison d'être for our agency is to publish the data and make it available. So we see it as a very good match to the mandate of our agency. There has been a long history already toward making data available in machine-readable formats and in open formats. Our publication processes for aggregate data for statistics are geared toward that end, so there is not an additional substantial cost in providing machine-readable open formats of our data.