Natural Resources Committee on May 8th, 2018

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Earlier, Dr. Dusyk spoke about data collection, Statistics Canada data analysis, and NRCan. What are the gaps related to StatsCan that we as a government can look at enhancing, or providing more resources to get better data? What are the gaps at StatsCan today?

[Bruce Lourie]

We don't actually have all of the information coming from multiple sectors, multiple utilities, multiple industry groups. It's very limited right now in the overall data aggregation capacity. There is this historic difficulty of getting information out of Statistics Canada, because of the rules around proprietary information or corporate information, so those things could be done in ways.... As Donald said, big companies like Amazon have figured out how to get data out there. Statistics Canada needs to have the attitude of trying to get data to people quickly, as opposed to just gathering and keeping the data.

[Donald Mustard]

I would take these guys out, do an interchange with Amazon and Google, and make them spend six months or a year seeing how it's done, and learning the way you interact with data. What I see, and I worked in the public service, is typically an IT solution, because there are limited resources. If it's difficult to do, we're going to make it really simple. We just won't make it accessible, right.

If you have a server that's not plugged into the network, then you do not have the risk of somebody actually coming in and stealing that data, but it doesn't solve the problem. It cripples you as well as technically protecting your organization. It becomes a silo of collections that provides no value. Truthfully, if you're not going to use the data, then why do you collect it in the first place?

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

That's a good note to end on.

Thank you both very much for joining us this morning. It has been very informative and very helpful to our study.

The meeting is adjourned.