Credibility and trust around data are fundamental in this, and I think the way those get built is to actually have something that has a degree of independence to it so that it is an agency that wouldn't just be kind of ripped out or altered or influenced at the whim of governments.
I really think too that we do have some very good institutions in this country, which we can rely on to be part of such a structure, and Statistics Canada would certainly be one of them. But I think even if you look at how the Energy Information Administration in the U.S. operates these days, they've gone very much beyond the old statistics-gathering model of “We're going to do surveys. We're going to commission it all ourselves. We're going to figure it out all ourselves. We're going to hold onto it for several years and analyze it all ourselves, and then we're going to decide whether or not anyone else should see it, and there are going to be all kinds of onerous privacy restrictions basically preventing data from being used.” That actually undermines the ability to use the data, and it undermines people's faith in the system.
I think Statistics Canada is moving forward on things, but we also really need to move to a model under which we can figure out who has the best data and how we can get access to that data. Again, on the example of electricity in Ontario, there is so much data that we don't know what to do with it. The issue is how we get it organized in a rigorous way so that anyone can look at it and analyze it and use it, as opposed to the system we have right now, which is very piecemeal.
I think independence and credibility are what build trust.