Transport Committee on Feb. 14th, 2017

[Hugo Grondin]

Investments in education and research are important. As to cities, their raison d'être is pretty basic. Their role is not to do research and development. As I said earlier, we work with the universities and CEGEPs.

Thought must be put into this and funding is needed to support the “smart city” concept. This is an interesting and important vector.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you for that.

I was thinking in terms of the real technical backbones like fibre optic lines, and even the electrical grid, which may need to be upgraded to handle this, because everything seems to run on electrical power.

Mr. Riseborough, I'm going to ask you a question that you're free to defer to somebody else, but I want to ask it anyway. The rail service to the Toronto airport has been underutilized. The ridership is low. What's missing? It's obviously a large infrastructure project that isn't performing as a lot of people thought it would, so are there gaps? What would you see happening to bring that up to its potential?

[Michael Riseborough]

I'll have to defer. Can I get back to you in writing on that question? I don't have the information.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Please do. Thank you.

I'm fine.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Okay, thank you.

Mr. Berthold.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I would like to thank our guests for being here. I will start with the spokesperson for Quebec City.

Since the initial studies of smart cities, there has been must discussion of improving citizens' access to various municipal services, facilitating transit, and sharing information.

I have noted that several communities do not have adequate Internet access. That might be less of a problem in Quebec City, but it still is in certain parts of Canada. That might not be as much of a concern to you. I would like to know, however, whether in your various meetings to plan the launch of the “smart municipality”, you considered people who cannot afford a cell phone to reserve their parking spot and who cannot afford to get Internet access.

In launching a smart city, what consideration is given to people who cannot pay $60 per month for an Internet connection and $60 per month for a cell phone?

[Hugo Grondin]

Earlier I mentioned that some work had been done with IBM in particular, in 2013. Digital inclusion and the digital divide were considered at that time.

Over 80% of people use the Internet, but we were wondering how exactly to adapt the way we offered our services. In our opinion, this involves libraries. We really want to democratize them. We want to provide access to tablets there so that people who cannot afford those tools can use and experience them. That is the vector we are using.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Going to the library to find a parking spot is not very convenient. If I cannot park to go use a tablet, to see if there is a space available, and to see if I can pay for my parking remotely because I don't have smart phone that costs $70 or $75 per month, this is not a very inclusive approach.

[Hugo Grondin]

That is a fact, in your example.

What we can offer our citizens does of course depend on the infrastructure and equipment we have.

We are betting on libraries. We do not claim that smart cities can solve all the problems and address all the issues. Cities are complex. As you know, cities offer quite a wide range of services. That is the vector we support to democratize Internet use. The more traditional avenues of communication are still in place, of course, and will certainly be around for some time to come.

Looking beyond Quebec City, we have to consider the situation in other cities in Quebec and Canada. You talked about installation, wireless and high-speed Internet networks. These are important factors to consider in examining the issue of Internet access across Canada.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

As you know, revolutions often start with people who know the issues. I am talking about people like you who are directly involved in the process and in the way of thinking about these things. Personally, I think the idea of sending people to libraries is a bit too easy.

I would like to see people like you, who are working very hard to make all technologies available, spend a bit more time thinking about these people. To my mind, a truly smart city would not have this divide in daily use and access to digital services. Looking at the big picture, it is nearly impossible. How can we make sure that everyone has access to a cell phone though?

[Hugo Grondin]

I have duly noted your suggestion since we want to work towards broad use of these tools. We have not addressed that aspect. We have considered it, but have not found a solution.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

I do not think that a city that leaves 20% of its population without services is smart.

[Hugo Grondin]

I definitely share your concern.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Thank you. You can pass on the message then.

I will certainly do that at upcoming meetings, once I have had the opportunity to talk with municipal representatives.

Mr. Riseborough, the problem is not as great at airports, I would say, because all the people who use airports already have a bit more money, which gives them access to technology.

[Michael Riseborough]

That's quite true.

Also, the airport has dynamic signage as well. We have a localized audience, which makes it a little bit easier for us to communicate with than for a city. As well, the passengers' needs are quite predictable and not so diverse. Essentially, they're trying to get to their aircraft or get from their aircraft to their bag to the ground transportation. Dynamic signage assists with that, particularly during irregular operations, which are not abnormal. We probably have about 100 days of irregular operations as a result of weather, not just in the local area but elsewhere around the globe.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Berthold.

Thank you to the witnesses. We have finished the first hour.

Thank you very much for your testimony. We appreciate it. I'm sure you'll be monitoring where we all go with our smart cities and smart infrastructure.

Thank you very much. I will suspend for a moment while we get our other witnesses at the table.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

We will reconvene for the second half of our meeting.

Today we have with us Teresa Scassa from the University of Ottawa, Sriram Narasimhan from the University of Waterloo, and Jennifer Schooling from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Welcome to all of you. We appreciate your being here.

Teresa, would you like to go first?

[Teresa Scassa, Canada Research Chair in Information Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual]

Thank you very much for the opportunity to address the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities on the issue of smart cities.

My research on smart cities is from a law and policy perspective. I have focused on issues around data ownership and control and related issues of transparency, accountability, and privacy.

The “smart” in “smart cities” is shorthand for the generation and analysis of data from sensor-laden cities. The data and its accompanying analytics are meant to enable better decision-making around planning and resource allocation, but the smart city does not arise in a public policy vacuum. Almost in parallel with the development of so-called smart cities is the growing open government movement, which champions open data and open information as keys to greater transparency, civic engagement, and innovation. My comments speak to the importance of ensuring that the development of smart cities is consistent with the goals of open government.

In the big data environment, data is a resource. Where the collection or generation of data is paid for by taxpayers, it's surely a public resource. My research has considered the location of rights of ownership and control over data in a variety of smart cities contexts. It raises concerns over the potential loss of control over such data, particularly rights to reuse the data, whether for innovation, civic engagement, or transparency purposes.

Smart cities innovation will result in the collection of massive quantities of data, and this data will be analyzed to generate predictions, visualizations, and other analytics. For the purposes of this very brief presentation, I'll characterize this data as having three potential sources. First, there are newly embedded sensor technologies that become part of smart cities infrastructure. Second, there are existing systems by which cities collect and process data. Third, there's citizen-generated data—data that is produced by citizens as a result of their daily activities and captured by some form of portable technology. Let me briefly provide examples of these three situations.

The first scenario involves newly embedded sensors that become part of smart cities infrastructure. Assume that a municipal transit authority contracts with a private sector company for hardware and software services for the collection and processing of real-time GPS data from public transit vehicles. Who will own the data generated through these services? Will it be the municipality that owns and operates the fleet of vehicles, or the company that owns the sensors and proprietary algorithms that process the data? The answer, which will be governed by the terms of the contract between the parties, will determine whether the transit authority is able to share this data with the public as open data.

This example raises the issue of the extent to which data sovereignty should be part of any smart cities plan. In other words, should policies be in place to ensure that cities own and/or control the data they collect in relation to their operations? To go a step further, should federal funding for smart infrastructure be tied to obligations to make non-personal data available as open data?

The second scenario is one in which cities take their existing data and contract with the private sector for its analysis. For example, a municipal police service provides its crime incident data to a private sector company that offers analytics services such as publicly available crime maps. Opting to use the pre-packaged private sector platform may have implications for the availability of the same data as open data, which, in turn, has implications for transparency, civic engagement, and innovation. It may also result in the use of data analytics services that are not appropriately customized to the particular Canadian local, regional, or national contexts.

In the third scenario, a government contracts for data that has been gathered by sensors owned by private sector companies. The data may come from GPS systems installed in cars, from smart phones or their associated apps, from fitness devices, and so on. Depending on the terms of the contract, the municipality may not be allowed to share the data upon which it is making its planning decisions. This will have important implications for the transparency of planning processes.

There are also other issues. Is the city responsible for vetting the privacy policies and practices of the app companies from which it will be purchasing its data? Is there a minimum privacy standard governments should insist upon when contracting for data collected from individuals by private sector companies? How can we reconcile private sector and public sector data protection laws when the public sector increasingly relies on the private sector for the collection and processing of its smart cities data? Which normative regime should prevail, and in what circumstances?

Finally, I would like to touch on a different yet related issue. This involves the situation in which a city that collects a large volume of data, including personal information, through its operation of smart services is approached by the private sector to share or sell that data in exchange for either money or services. This could be very tempting for cash-strapped municipalities. For example, a large volume of data about the movement and daily travel habits of urban residents is collected through smart card payment systems. Under what circumstances is it appropriate for governments to monetize this type of data?

My comments have only briefly touched on some of the law and policy issues regarding data in the smart cities context. I will be happy to address these issues, as well as any others, in the time allotted for questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Ms. Scassa.

We'll move on to Ms. Schooling.

Welcome. We very much appreciate the fact that you're sharing your information with us today and monitoring what we're doing here in Canada.

[Jennifer Schooling, Director, Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction, University of Cambridge, As an Individual]

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you.

I am the director of the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction, which is based in the department of engineering at the University of Cambridge.

We are slightly interesting for a research organization in that we're jointly funded, not just by the research council, but also by Innovate UK, which is the government's innovation funding arm. They normally give their money purely to industry, but in the case of centres like mine, they give it to universities to help us bridge the innovation gap between good research coming out of the university and its implementation in industry.

The reason they chose to fund an innovation and knowledge centre in smart infrastructure and construction was that they perceived there to be a market failure at the moment. There's a real opportunity with the sort of fourth industrial revolution and this huge burgeoning of the capability to sense things with newly invented sensors and to gather data to understand the condition of our infrastructure better, understand how well our designs perform, and get better value out of our infrastructure on behalf of the citizens.

However, the infrastructure and construction industry is being very slow at responding to this fourth industrial revolution. If we look at the manufacturing industry, particularly in Germany, they're pushing something called industry 4.0. They are really embracing the opportunity that sensor data gives them to understand their assets, to get better models of how they're degrading and, therefore, to offer different kinds of service models to their customers. In infrastructure and construction, certainly in the U.K.—and, actually I think it's fair to say, globally—we are far behind the curve on this. But there is a huge potential to deliver massive value to the public through better use of our infrastructure.

One of the challenges we have in the U.K.—and I suspect you have similar challenges in Canada—is that a lot of our infrastructure is very old. A lot of it was built in the Victorian era, and we have very limited information about it. If we're really lucky, we might have a drawing of a bridge that's 120 years old, but we don't know whether they built what they drew. We don't know quite what lies behind the abutment walls and so forth.

When we come to try to maintain these assets, we are really working in the dark, and we aren't doing a very good job as an industry of gathering our data in a consistent way so that we can use it to start to understand these assets and also to understand even our new assets and get better models for how we design them, construct them more efficiently and effectively, and then manage and operate them better.

The issue with that is as follows. The previous speaker talked about data being a resource. It's also an asset. What's tending to happen in the infrastructure and construction industry is that people are going and inspecting things, for example, going and inspecting a bridge, but the data isn't well gathered. It isn't well curated and it's not retrievable later on. If you then have a problem further down the line with that asset, it's very hard to look back and get value from that, to get good deterioration models, to get good understanding of how the condition of an asset is impacting its serviceability, and so forth.

There have been, however, some interesting steps forward in the U.K., partly through the setting up of our centre. We work with 40 partners in industry and government to demonstrate potential solutions. We've done everything from send our guys out onto construction sites in lovely luminous orange jackets to install sensors and understand how to interpret the data from that to understand the assets better through to working at an organizational level with asset management teams to look at how they structure their data, how they share their data, and enable them to get better use from that data. But we are very much in the foothills, I think, as an industry.

The U.K. government has made some interesting moves in this area. They decided about four years ago that, from the year 2016, any publicly funded construction project would have to comply with the requirements of what's called BIM level 2—that's building information modelling level 2—which is essentially a way of using 3-D, CAD-generated data and other kinds of data to collaborate around the design of something, but then also around the construction of it. You can use this BIM protocol to manage everything from the design through to the construction and potentially the handover of the asset.

That has really driven the industry to embrace this. Our industry is typically very conservative because it works with very low margins. It's heavily regulated for reliability, safety, and so forth. But if the government, as a client says, expects industry to deliver this, then people have no choice but to deliver it. That's enabled a big step forward in the U.K.

The industry is still a little nervous and struggles somewhat with the challenges of making sense of data. The big data arena that the previous speaker alluded to is a great opportunity, but it's also quite frightening, particularly if you're sitting in a contractor's organization and wondering how on earth you process it all.

One of the other challenges, certainly in the U.K. context, is that our supply chain is very segmented and so there are a lot of split incentives. If you have an organization that's responsible for building an asset, it's very hard for them to justify, in their own business case, investing in something that will bring benefits 20 years down the line in operation. At the same time, as a client, you might want that because 20 years down the line, you will still have your asset, your bridge, your tunnel, whatever it is, and you want to be able to use the benefits that would bring. So there's quite a challenge at the moment in the way the industry is structured and the way we carry out contracting. I'm afraid I don't know anything about the way contracts work in Canada, but these things are set up quite adversarially and, therefore, we're struggling to get the benefits over the whole lifetime of a project.

Then there is this challenge of getting data protocols. That will help to enable people to share data more easily, both between organizations that are given points in the assets' life, be that design, construction, or management, and also over the lifetime of the asset. Most assets will have several organizations responsible for them over the time they exist physically for 100 to 120 years, and we need to find ways that data can be passed from one organization to another.

The other interesting aspect that we're starting to focus on in the U.K.—and I'm involved in some of the standards organizations on this—is cybersecurity. I'll touch very briefly on this, but if people want more information, I can expand on it a bit later. The Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure in the U.K. realized quite quickly when we started getting engaged with these BIM models—these wonderful 3D models or assets that we were plastering up all over presentations everywhere—was that we were inadvertently revealing a huge amount of information about pretty critical assets.

There's a major station in London called Victoria Station, which has several underground and overground lines running through it. It's also very close to Parliament, so there are quite a lot of parliamentary-related buildings around there. As engineers we were happily throwing up these BIM models rather naively and saying, “Look how brilliant BIM is. We can use it in these ways to manage construction and make sure we don't interfere with operations and so forth.” This chap from CPNI saw one of these presentations and said he could see three or four critical national asset components there that we really shouldn't be showing to anybody who happens to be able to get hold of a set of these slides. That has initiated a process of trying to bring in cybersecurity protocols and good practice around security at as early a stage as possible with these digital protocols we're using.

Just to make sure that we get over our naïveté—it was in the early days, and we got over our naïveté pretty quickly—so we can get the best use out of these maps—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Excuse me, Ms. Schooling, can you include the rest of your testimony possibly in answers to questions from the committee?

[Jennifer Schooling]

That was pretty much the last thing I was going to say.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Okay. Thank you very much.

Sriram Narasimhan, from the University of Waterloo, please go ahead.

[Sriram Narasimhan, Associate Professor, University of Waterloo, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and members of the committee, for the opportunity to present before you this afternoon. I'll try to keep my introductory comments brief.

My name is Sriram Narasimhan. I'm an associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo. I'm also cross-appointed with the department of mechanical and mechatronics engineering for the University of Waterloo. There, I also hold the title of Canada research chair in smart infrastructure.

I received my Ph.D. in 2005 from Rice University in Houston, Texas. I joined the University of Waterloo shortly thereafter, in 2006. Prior to joining the University of Waterloo, I was employed with American Bureau of Shipping in the risk consulting division, in Houston, Texas. I'm a registered engineer in the province of Ontario.

With regard to a bit about what my students and I are doing in research, the overarching aims of my chair here at Waterloo are to understand issues surrounding infrastructure and to enable condition assessment of critical infrastructure, such as bridges, airport systems, and water distribution networks, primarily through the use of sensors and smart data acquisition systems and hardware. This is so that we can develop strategies to mitigate unanticipated failures in vulnerable and aging infrastructure and develop cost-effective maintenance and capital projects planning.

My research spans across the areas of structural dynamics, condition assessment of vulnerable infrastructure, and structure control. Most of my work in the context of my chair pertains to how best to extract pertinent information regarding the health of infrastructure from measurements acquired from sensors installed on structures and systems. For example, I'm working with my team of students and post-doctoral fellows in developing hydrant-mounted sensors that can effectively determine leaks and other disruptive events within varied water distribution networks. Similarly, we are working towards better understanding what measurements tell us are going to help aging bridges.

I'm partnered with several public and private entities in pursuit of our research goals. We are now witnessing an era of digital transformation, where our ability to measure infrastructure performance during operation using sensors and processors has far surpassed our wildest imagination from just a few decades ago.

The smart communities of the future are ones that will effectively utilize this explosion of technology for the betterment of the life of their citizens. For example, our ability to measure energy demands within a smart community will help us to better balance generation and storage. Our ability to assess the health of aging bridges using sensors will help planners to come up with maintenance and refurbishment plans, taking into account budgetary and manpower constraints. Such technology will also help us identify and repair leaks in water mains before they flood our streets and hospitals.

For us to realize the goal of smart communities, we should overcome the technical gaps and technological gaps to using this technology, specifically how best to infer knowledge from data and through investments that enable the adoption of this technology within communities.

In Canada, we have some unique challenges related to geography and weather constraints. Hence, we cannot expect manual inspections in remote areas to ensure structural integrity. In my role as a witness to this important committee, I can offer my perspective on where and how sensors can transform our lives and better balance budgetary constraints and aging infrastructure needs.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much. We appreciate that.

Mr. Rayes, for six minutes.