Thank you for the question. I think it's an excellent one.
As Bradford just noted, sometimes we have data on national information but not down to provincial levels. As we all know, energy is a provincial responsibility in Canada. If we have to engage the provinces in an energy transition, they're interested in the economic benefits, they're interested in reducing the environmental footprint, and they're interested in supporting their industries and creating jobs, etc., so we need that provincial data.
We're a major user of the CDIAC data source. We go and look for data anywhere we can get it. That is one of the challenges. Sometimes you collect data at one location, and then you have other data from another. When you try to put them together and make sense of them, you realize that they don't make sense. Even though they use the same words to describe what the data is, they actually have different meanings. The struggle is to actually go down and understand that this data includes something else that this other data doesn't. We spend literally weeks and months a year trying to actually sort out the data. In the end, we get it for our own research group. It's crazy, because what I really want to do, if we're going to do all that work, is make it publicly available so that other people don't have to go through the pain and suffering. I know that Brad's centre has done some fantastic work in trying to do this and to put this out, but everybody's working on a shoestring and there's not coordination. We need coordination amongst the datasets and we need finer data, down to the provincial level and ideally municipal, because 75% of our greenhouse gas emissions and much of our economic activity is in our municipalities. They have to be at the table as well. We need that kind of data.
I think having a data information organization that has the mandate and responsibility and support to actually coordinate and rationalize it is absolutely critical. It would save a lot of time and energy. In my research program and my activity, I see myself not as a data collector but as a data user. However, I'm afraid I spend a lot more time than I'd like to in trying to collect and compile data so that I can use it. It's painful. I would love for somebody else to do it, because we'd like to spend a lot more of our time figuring out how we can take this data, shape more useful products, and identify these transition pathways so that society in general would say, “Let's go there. Let's build a better tomorrow.”