Government Operations Committee on May 15th, 2014

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Will you send the committee a written answer in a timely fashion?

[Bill Joyce]

Absolutely, I will do it as soon as possible.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you kindly.

Mr. Béland, do you have any additional information on the subject to share with the committee? Perhaps you could expand on Mr. Joyce's answer.

[Yves Béland, Director General, Operations Branch, Statistics Canada]

As Mr. Joyce mentioned, our area of expertise is the dissemination of data. Our mandate is to release the information provided by the various programs to the public. As Mr. Joyce said, we can take note of your questions and get the answers from the people at the agency who have that information.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you.

How much time do I have left, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thirty seconds.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

I am going to use that time to once again condemn the fact that certain types of data are no longer available.

This is a study that focuses on giving Canadians the broadest possible access to quality data. And yet, Statistics Canada is having to take down previously posted data from its Web site because it can no longer be used by those who need it. Quite frankly, I find it incomprehensible. It seems to go against the objectives that the government says it wants to achieve.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Ms. Michaud.

Mr. Adler, your turn for five minutes.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank all the witnesses for being here today.

I just want to begin with Mr. Shukle. You mentioned earlier that as more and more data sets become available through single portals, it becomes more difficult for the user to find that needle in the haystack.

Open data is all great, and by taking information and making it more readily available, just sort of pouring it out there, what is being done specifically to allow individuals to find the specific data sets that they are looking for?

There may be people, of course, who are adept at doing this kind of research, but most aren't. So open data is all fine, but for those lay-users who are just interested in finding specific information, who wouldn't typically go to a site like this but who are interested in finding out something specific, how user friendly is it for them? How are they able to be directed to the information that they need?

[Prashant Shukle]

I'll speak to my experience on geospatial data. I highlighted the fact that we had taken a very disciplined approach to our data, well over 100 years. You have to have a couple of things. One, you have to have really good metadata in a current context, and that could mean how you file and categorize your data. Then the data itself has to be managed in fairly standard formats and according to a rigorous process.

We actually have ISO processes, and we have international standards associated with how it is we manage our data. We actually play a leadership role in helping to define those standards so that we can get Canadian companies up at the forefront in being able to participate.

The second piece in the digital age with respect to that data is that you want to have vendor neutrality. You want to be able to have geospatial information, a map that can talk on an iPad should be able to talk on a Samsung, should be able to talk on a BlackBerry. You need that interoperability and you need standards associated within interoperability.

I guess I should say there are three things. The third thing is that I actually welcome the open data portal, because I think it condenses the number of federal portals. As a user myself, I find that finding the needle in the haystack is difficult because of the sheer volume of portals that exist and websites that exist. Having the open data portal forces a convergence and an ability for us, from a client perspective, to make sure that we find that data much more easily.

We're currently working with Treasury Board and others, like Google and the other big service providers, to sharpen the search engines. If you sharpen the search engines and you have better data, highly structured, available data, you should be able to search once and find everything.

That mantra that I talked about before, “search once and find everything”, that's what we want to do.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

You mentioned about the ISO and the international standard. So Canada has played a key role in terms of making universal definitions. If you go to the Canadian single portal and you're looking for specific information, and then you go to the U.K.'s, the phraseology may be a little different. You're looking for the same kind of information, but they define it differently.

So there is this kind of international standard that Canada is playing a lead role in. Is this what you're saying?

[Prashant Shukle]

Again, I'll speak to the domain of the geospatial, which I would argue is the reference, because everything happens in a place, right? So, on that geospatial stuff, we work with the Ordnance Survey in Great Britain. We sit on the Open Geospatial Consortium with, I think, 437 organizations, a vast number of countries. We participate at the UN forum on global geographic information management. We're also doing the same thing from a satellite data perspective. So, yes, we're heavily involved.

We're helping to write the standards. We're helping to participate in the global discussions. We believe that Canadian firms and companies that deal in geospatial technologies should be able to participate at the international level because the volume of business opportunity is very significant, and it's by making sure that we play at that international level through an appropriate government role. But having a heavy private sector involvement and Canadian standards and leadership are key to an economic success.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

We're all aware of these data brokers out there, and all of that. Do you foresee a time when there will be so much of this public data out there that we'll need some kind of...? I guess the resources of the public sector are limited in terms of maybe a sense of all of that data. At some point, do you see the private sector being involved in the public data sphere of making sense of all of that public data and then being able to sell it to the private sector?

[Prashant Shukle]

I think the answer is yes. I think there's always going to be a role. I think that role is always going to evolve with the technologies. But I'll give you an example of a private sector company actually using the data. Kodiak Exploration, for example, reported to NRCan that $18 million in gold exploration resulted directly from open geological data accessed through our GeoGratis portal at NRCan. What they actually did is they combined the digital data from our topographic maps with other open online drilling data.

So you have either this brokering that's already happening in the private sector or you're probably going to get a rise of data management firms. I think that's what the big data analytics movement is all about.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

What was—

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Adler.

[Prashant Shukle]

It's Kodiak Exploration.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Since your time is up, I am now turning the floor over to Mr. Easter for five minutes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, everyone, for coming.

I did take a look at the CIHI data. I don't know why I've never seen it before, but it is impressive. In my area, one of the complaints we always get is that there are not enough doctors. We stack up fairly well in that area, but we're a little over on cost when I look at your data.

In any event, just to start off, I do want to add to Ms. Michaud's point. There's no need to get into a discussion on it, but there is increasing concern out there about the reliability of Stats Canada data, especially in the smaller communities. It was a government decision, and all I would say is that given the facts that have come forward, the government has the right to make the decisions they want, but I would hope the government reconsiders that decision, based on what we're seeing now as not reliable data in smaller areas.

I wanted to turn to the Health Canada information on your open data portal on, basically, information on drug products, natural health products, etc. That's a difficult area because I expect if you put up something that could be challenged by a drug company—negative impacts of a drug—you could face liability. Is there pressure from drug companies on what you put up? Do you find yourself in a position as a department maybe reluctant to put up what some of the side effects of a drug might be, given what I expect is a concern about liability?

[Guylaine Montplaisir]

We do routinely publish the information and the negative effects of drugs on our website through the Canada vigilance program. What we publish or don't publish isn't under pressure of industry or any other pharmaceutical organizations or anything like that. It's just information we routinely publish on our website.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

One of the big concerns of people—and we actually have some experience in some of our constituency offices with this. The concern people have when they're put on a drug is what the side effects might be. How do you determine that? Do you determine it from the pharmaceutical companies' or the drug suppliers' information, or do you get that from doctors over time? How does that work?

[Guylaine Montplaisir]

The information is reported from multiple sources. It may be reported from people taking drugs. It may be reported from pharmacists or from medical doctors. It comes from all sources. It's aggregated and then it's published.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you.

One of the other areas I found rather interesting in your presentation was that you seem to be moving to provide energy projects data as well as weather data. Why is that?

[Guylaine Montplaisir]

I simply talked about the need to look at sources of data more horizontally. We know that things like the weather have impact on the health of Canadians. Whether you live up north or in other regions of the country, we see different patterns from a health perspective. So we see the value in integrating data and we really want to move in that direction.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

We always find you're in a better mood if you're living in P.E.I.

On natural resources, you partly, I think, answered this question of Mr. Adler's. You related it to some mining, I guess, in Canada, but how do you see this information from open data being utilized more to provide economic opportunities for some of the private businesses out there? I can certainly see it both in the forestry area and in the mining area, but could you give us other examples?