Thank you.
Swim Drink Fish Canada/Lake Ontario Waterkeeper is a grassroots environmental organization that uses research, education and legal tools to protect and restore the public's right to swim, drink, and fish in Lake Ontario. As a non-political registered charity, Waterkeeper focuses on research and justice issues in the public interest. It works with communities to facilitate the use of environmental laws to protect their rights to swim, drink, and fish, and it participates in a variety of legal and public consultation processes to help ensure environmental decisions are made on the basis of sound and tested scientific evidence by independent decision-makers in the public interest.
Waterkeeper was invited to present before this standing committee, and we thank you for the opportunity to share our thoughts on the current state and future of energy data in Canada.
This is an important time for federal energy policy, and it is full of promise for creating a more transparent, accountable, and responsive energy planning and regulatory landscape. Last year, Waterkeeper submitted a written paper to the expert panel of the National Energy Board modernization review process. One of our organization's recommendations addressed the need for an independent body responsible for collecting and disseminating energy data and other information. The expert panel's final report also ultimately proposed the creation of a Canadian energy information agency.
At the same time, if such an agency is created and made responsible for producing energy supply and demand forecasts that are then used to inform federal energy policy and assess the economic and technical merits of new energy infrastructure, it must be accompanied by a robust process in which this information can be tested and supplemented by members of the public and public interest organizations with expertise in these areas. Therefore, the development and provision of this data must be understood and designed with this larger regulatory context in mind.
Waterkeeper also made several other information and data-specific recommendations in our report to the expert panel, which may be worth discussing at this time.
First and foremost, the development and publication of energy data must be guided by the public interest. Here, conceptions of the public interest must include the right to a healthy environment and access to information about how energy production can impact the environment. Therefore, environmental data not limited to that concerning climate change must be included prominently in any future energy data hubs and/or platforms. This should include comprehensive pipeline failure data in line with that currently collected by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. It should also include other environmental impacts of energy production and transportation, such as water use and impacts to local watersheds.
Second, the accessibility and user-friendliness of data is crucial. Waterkeeper advocated for standardized and centralized one-window access to energy data from across the country from federal, territorial, and provincial governments and government agencies, as well as universities, industry, and the non-profit sector. A single data hub or platform in which all information has already been collected can be made compatible for comparison and analysis, and this would be immensely useful.
Third, open data and access to disaggregated data, with provisions in place to protect sensitive information, is crucial for government transparency and accountability. It also leads to higher quality science and greater productivity, not to mention facilitating more meaningful public engagement. Further, open-access disaggregated data does not preclude the continued publication of aggregated data and energy reports that are already being undertaken by government and government agencies. It just makes such reports more transparent and accountable.
Significantly, the federal government has an open data plan that contains several commitments to help guide developments in energy data and information-sharing policies. The plan commits to expanding and improving open data across federal public services with special attention paid to the extracted sector, federal science activities, and geospatial data. The way those commitments are phrased provides a lot of opportunity for very creative thinking in terms of interdisciplinary data sharing in this area.
I'll end my presentation there and look forward to your questions. My speaking notes also contain several citations referencing reports with more specific information on each of the recommendations I've just spoken about.
Thank you.