Thank you all for being here today. This is a really interesting subject to me. Before I got this job, I was an ecologist working on national-scale ecosystem planning projects and bird population trend analyses that all involved big datasets across provincial boundaries, with a lot of data coming from industry. It was a nightmare gathering all that data. It sounds like it's kind of the same here.
The groups I worked with developed their own expertise in this, but when we looked at things like forest cover between B.C., Alberta, and Ontario, it was all different. Everything had to be cross walked in various ways. It was very time-consuming. I would have thought it would be a little different with energy, but it seems that some of the problems are the same.
Yesterday evening, I was over at the Positive Energy meetings at the University of Ottawa. They just put out a study called “Durable Balance: Informed Reform of Energy Decision-making in Canada”, which seemed very timely. They have a one-page summary of what that group feels needs to be done about the Canada energy information system.
I would first ask both groups here about the extent of that problem between provinces and industry. You say you have the expertise, but how big a problem is that with different datasets being in different formats, gathering different kinds of data, and having to massage it? Is that a concern in the energy data world?