Government Operations committee  I think our commitments aren't totally out of line with commitments made from other countries, if we look at the context of our national action plan. With the G-8, we were involved in the charter on open data, so we adopted an open data charter with the other G-8 leaders. The charter commits Canada and the other G-8 member countries to a set of norms and standards for the proactive release of more high-quality user-friendly data that's unrestricted in the way people can use it and reuse it.

Government Operations committee  A lot of the data in the data portal is data that was already released to the public. We can think of this as potentially an improvement, although there's work to be done in terms of the actual portal itself. We're seeing the data we have, what we own in Canada, and how it can be structured in a way that makes it more accessible.

Government Operations committee  I think that's something that could definitely be strengthened. I think you raise a really good point to say that the data portal is really young, and our commitments in general to various aspects of open government are pretty young. So really we're in the second year of our commitments under our national action plan.

Government Operations committee  That's a good question. We've actually defined or structured our action plan around different aspects of open government in Canada in a really rational way. In Canada we talk about open government in terms of open information, open data, and open dialogue. The open information bit of things relates more to access to information and it relates more to what we often hear referred to as unstructured data.

Government Operations committee  No. I mean engagement in dialogue around the open data bit has actually been not too bad compared to some of the other areas of open government. There have been various consultations that have been held since we joined the Open Government Partnership. As part of our membership in that body, we had to have a consultation around the development of our first action plan.

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to your committee. I'm going to focus my opening remarks on the Open Government Partnership, or the OGP, in which Canada is a member. The OGP secures commitments from governments to improve transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement; to fight corruption; and to harness technology to strengthen governance.