Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for joining us this morning.
I want to talk about this study that we've done and kind of give you a sense of why you're here today.
We started with customers—if you're ever trying to solve a business problem, that's a good place to start—and asked Canadians and representatives of different users of data what they'd be looking for. Then we did a scan around the world. What are other countries doing? What are other levels of government doing? Then we thought we'd end with our own government departments and get a sense of whether we are making good progress when it comes to open data.
What we've heard is that it's very important to have some raw data so that researchers and data experts can do things with the data, but also to have some synthesized data. Regular people on the street need to be able to access data also, and if there are some kinds of syntheses that different departments can do, that's very helpful. Also, because of all the data sets, hundreds or even thousands of data sets, there has to be some kind of search capability that regular lay-users can use to find out where that important data is.
There has also been mention of the billions or trillions of economic opportunity. A lot of that is actually savings in government, that actually opening data drives efficiencies in the sense of different people within government sharing data amongst themselves. If it's open data, you don't have to make expensive requests. It also makes it cheaper and more effective for Canadians to access data. It also drives really important benefits when it comes to decision making. Whether it's investments, or health, or safety information, it simply drives benefits. So there's unanimity that open data is a good idea. Nobody says open data is a bad idea.
My questions are more of a practical nature. We're trying to provide some recommendations to the Treasury Board, which is spearheading this initiative. There's a sense that these different open data initiatives are happening in each of your departments and all doing good work. Do you sense...? This is more of a polling question and maybe we'll go in the same order in which you made your presentations. Do you sense there's a need for more intervention from a centralized agency to do a horizontal initiative across your departments, whether it's Treasury Board or Shared Services Canada, if there were a role for a central coordinator of an open data initiative? Or are you better off doing it within each of your departmental verticals?
We want to get there. It's how can we get there with higher quality and more quickly. It's that kind of program management approach. What do you think would be the better way to achieve that result of trying to get to more open data?
