I think that in any dialogue it's important to cover all sides of the story, so we wouldn't want to fall into strictly negative dialogue on big data, big data analytics, and the negative potential. I think we need to keep stressing all the good things about big data, including predicting when there are weather events happening, and also in terms of how, based on social media, communities can come together quickly in an emergency to solve a problem and to help find missing people and so on.
I think we need a balanced dialogue that highlights the great examples of the positive use of big data analytics and the great innovation potential for our economy from firms that are developing these tools, collecting big data, and making open data available. The federal government is a big sponsor of open data, through the open data portal. We have many open datasets, a lot of which are geospatial, which help Canadians, as well as many people internationally, understand the different constructs of the country,