Public Accounts committee  Absolutely. Over the last three years the government has been working very hard on online accessibility for people with visual and other impairments, and we have met our target objectives in this area and are now exporting, so to speak. The work we've done is now available on open source to other jurisdictions, internationally and provincially.

Public Accounts committee  It requires some forethought, design, and the use of the right techniques and obviously individuals able to adopt those techniques carefully. It does take a bit more time, but it's certainly well worth it and we've automated it to a great extent to make it as easy as possible to be compliant.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, security is certainly top of mind in any online service delivery. In fact, balancing convenience with security and the protection of personal and confidential information is always the key challenge that we work with and we've kept focused on this for some time. For instance, our new cyber authentication service, which provides Canadians single sign-on ability to access government services online, is very secure.

Public Accounts committee  Absolutely. One of our solutions for online authentication is to be able to leverage the financial institution's security for online services. For instance, Canadians can now, using their bank debit card, go through the banking infrastructure for online access and access their government services that way.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I am pleased to be here to speak to the Auditor General's recommendations regarding the Treasury Board Secretariat's role in ensuring that Canadians can electronically access government programs and services. With me today is Sharon Squire from the CIOB, who will help in addressing questions.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much. That's an excellent question. In fact, we have done a number of things. The first thing we did was we surveyed our community departmental security officers extensively to understand what they believed were the needs across the community for more security awareness.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, good afternoon. I'm pleased to be here to report on progress made by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat regarding chapter 3 of the 2012 Fall Report of the Auditor General of Canada. As Deputy Minister Guimont indicated in his remarks, cyber-security is a shared responsibility.

Information & Ethics committee  I would just like to say thank you very much to the committee for showing an interest. It is an important and exciting area and we're committed to continuing our work in this regard.

Information & Ethics committee  We are the policy centre for access to information. What that means is we issue policy instruments and best practices and guidelines. We work with the community on rolling these guidelines and best practices out, ensuring that they're able to support them. We support the community periodically.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely. It is the deputy head of every department who is responsible for complying with the access to information policy.

Information & Ethics committee  Just to build on Mr. Shawcross's comments, Environment Canada has roughly 40 reusable data sets on a total inventory of 500 potential data sets. Making it available through his programming interface allows them to limit the translation and the metadata to a much smaller subset, which they reuse to all 500.

Information & Ethics committee  Policies are issued by Treasury Board ministers; our job as a secretariat is to study, provide advice, make recommendations, and so on. Clearly, if a policy is adopted, then we work with departments on how to comply with the policy. We enable them and we work with departments regularly on assessing compliance.

Information & Ethics committee  That wasn't a website to apply for access requests online, but a website that was summarizing a very small subset of access requests. Unfortunately, it was very outdated and it had only a very small subset. In fact, the data were collected in an inconsistent format and fashion, thereby making the information more misleading than valuable.

Information & Ethics committee  We are currently assessing what can be done to foster greater ease of making an access request online and paying with a credit card. Some departments allow that today—not many, but some departments do allow you to make an access request online and pay by credit card. We are looking at making that broader and more accessible as Canadians are more at ease in dealing that way today than they were even five years ago.

Information & Ethics committee  GCPEDIA is a tool designed specifically for employees of government departments and agencies.