Thank you, and thank you for inviting me to speak before the committee. I would largely echo a lot of what David has just said. The path forward is having a network of data houses across the country.
The Canadian Energy and Emissions Data Centre, which I help run, is a non-profit organization that's primarily funded through government and industry sponsorship, and formerly was primarily focused on industry. The organization was set up by NRCan in 1993, and after 25 years we're still providing data that's a primary resource for many Canadians.
Our initial mandate was specifically for industry. Other data centres were set up for buildings, agriculture, and transportation. We have recently expanded our mandate to be a comprehensive data centre for all sectors. This includes industry, buildings, urban systems, transportation, electricity generation, and biofuels. We're expanding to all the energy sources that are relevant to Canadians for policy-making. We've also expanded to include emissions. As David said, this is one of the primary policy areas that Canada has been working on lately, and it is closely tied to energy.
Aside from providing public access to data, we also perform modelling and analysis for various levels of government, industry, NGOs, and international organizations. Having neutral third party data analysis that is separate from Statistics Canada and other government agencies helps give industry and NGOs confidence in the impartiality and independence of the data. We have a long track record of doing this, while maintaining sensitive, confidential information.
I see this as a complement to ministries like StatsCan that help to confirm and provide data, rather than as an alternative. Our recommendation would be that the Government of Canada help support these third party data providers and build a network across Canada that can support more analysis and all the different objectives that different users have.
As David mentioned, long-term support for these types of initiatives is very important. There was an initial burst in the 1990s for setting up these data centres. They have all since ceased to exist. CEEDC is the only one that's managed to survive, and that's largely been due to support from industry that's helped carry it. Government funding would be ideal to help us survive.
The committee asked some specific questions about the types of data that would be useful, and about the users. Access to national data is relevant for helping us meet our policy goals. Production and output data and data on environmental impacts like GHGs help us to relate economic growth to energy demand and efficiency. These all feed into our policy objectives on many different initiatives, such as emission intensities, carbon pricing, output-based allocations, efficiency standards, and fuel standards. All of these are tied to a variety of energy data.
Users range from industry, consultants, NGOs, and people who are critiquing policy or making and trying to influence policy, to public individuals and academics who are doing things like long-term modelling or looking at where our pathways to getting to our targets should be, and then to government itself. Government often accesses third party data to help confirm what it's collected internally.
We regularly interact with these users, and those discussions around data needs or data gaps are particularly valuable for finding out where we need to move in terms of new collection areas or strengthening what we are already doing.
The major needs that we see for data users break down to a few categories, but almost always it's for having more disaggregated information. This could be on more types of energy data related to new business opportunities, market penetration, or looking at other jurisdictions.
It could be about technologies. It could be about different new types of energy—wind, solar, and cogeneration, areas where industry or private entities are already moving that we're not yet collecting enough information on. It could be on things like fossil fuels and having more disaggregated information on fossil fuels to help us calculate our greenhouse gas emissions. These are related to our climate change targets. Unfortunately, this information is often considered one of the most confidential areas, and therefore Statistics Canada is not able to release enough disaggregated information for the public to be able to critique different policies.
The last need is for more disaggregated information around jurisdiction. Currently, we have fairly good data at the national level, but as soon as we get into provincial or regional and municipal levels, we start having a lot more confidentiality issues, and it's more difficult for us to do analyses on these areas. Comprehensive energy data, broken down by region and energy type, is necessary for us to help figure out where we're going and where we are, benchmarking our already existing policies in terms of how we're doing and where we're going.
These discussions around new data or data gaps are also extremely relevant for highlighting our social, climate, and economic objectives and how we might get there. These data provide a solid foundation for those discussions. As David said, an impartial and independent data entity—these already exist across Canada; it's just a matter of making them more robust.
Thank you for allowing me this time.