Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister.
I am very pleased to add to this discussion on the report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics on the statutory review of the Conflict of Interest Act. Before I do that, however, I would like to thank the committee for undertaking such a thorough review of this act. This process provided an important opportunity to examine the act to ensure that it is providing the clarity, fairness and accountability that Canadians rightly seek.
As the committee noted in its report, the act is working well in accordance with its objectives, but before this act existed, the situation was far from satisfactory. There was much concern, and with good reason. The government touches on all sectors of the economy. It does this in a multitude of ways, through regulatory agencies, legislation, tariffs and tax policies, to name but a few. Canadians need to have the confidence that public office holders are impartial and act with integrity, and this government took real action.
Our first piece of legislation, the Federal Accountability Act, included the Conflict of Interest Act, which gave Canada for the first time a regime to govern the ethical conduct of public office holders, both during and after employment. These changes represented a major improvement to Canada's accountability regime, and the government welcomes the 16 recommendations outlined in the committee's report and agrees with the intent and improvements to the Conflict of Interest Act. Canada now has one of the most accountable and transparent systems of governance in the world, and the committee's recommendations can help us make that even better.
We know that a high degree of transparency makes government more accountable and is vital to the effective participation of citizens and organizations in the decision-making process. However, accountability and transparency in public institutions is something we can never take for granted. That is why we have been working hard to make more and more information available to Canadians.
By proactively making government information available, it becomes accessible to anyone who may be interested. In that same spirit, the President of the Treasury Board recently took steps to ensure that information disclosed about public service contracts is accessible and easy to understand.
The new measures ensure that more detailed information is published on contracts for services such as professional services and management consultant contracts. For example, rather than simply providing a generic description of the awarded contract, a more detailed explanation of the type of work and context is now required. It is all part of the government's effort to provide our citizens with information previously stored within the government's vault, so to speak.
In fact, we are opening the lid on a vast store of valuable information that has until very recently been diligently collected and just stored away. The Government of Canada produces and acquires vast amounts of data. This data supports service delivery in the areas such as health, environment, agriculture and natural resources. Through our open data efforts, we are now releasing information in machine-readable formats by way of portals, meta data and search tools for reuse by governments, citizens, voluntary organizations and the private sector in new and unanticipated ways. The door is now being thrown open and the possibilities are truly exciting.
The open data portal at data.gc.ca is a one-stop shop for federal government data that can be downloaded free of charge by Canadian citizens, researchers, voluntary organizations and private sector businesses. It is a collaborative effort among Government of Canada departments and agencies to provide access to data managed by the government that can be leveraged by citizens, businesses and communities for their very own purposes.
These datasets, which now number around 200,000, include everything from building permits and wait times for non-emergency surgeries, to pollution emissions and lineup times at the border. Statistics Canada, for example, has made its community level health profiles available as well as 2001, 2006 and 2011 census data and socio-economic geographic data. Environment Canada has put out information about fish stocks and freshwater quality indicator data from the Canadian environmental sustainability—