Government Operations committee  Sure. There are a number of other countries, perhaps not quite as close to us, so that we don't work with them quite as frequently. Brazil is significant. All of the Scandinavian countries are very advanced in terms of open data. Australia and New Zealand are also active in open data, and in open government in general.

Government Operations committee  We're at the top echelon.

Government Operations committee  Yes. We weren't. The U.K. and the U.S., and other countries had definitely hit the ground running a little bit faster than we did, but we've caught up. In many instances that's helped to bind the relationship we have with those two countries. The work that we continue to advance is now work that we're doing with them, and that has helped us to close the gap.

Government Operations committee  The G-8 Open Data Charter is specifically designed to support more comparison of data across the G-8 jurisdictions in very specific subdata domains, such as budget, procurement, and legislation. They want to be able to look at the data sets from different countries across the G-8 in order to compare and contrast.

Government Operations committee  For Canada it's a little more of an extrapolation. We can certainly point to the 15 different companies that are using open data to make money on their bottom line. In the States and in the U.K. that information, that analysis, has gone a lot farther because they've been at it for a longer period than we have.

Government Operations committee  We have two. We have mandatory reporting requirements associated with the OGP and with the G-8. In the OGP it's an annual reporting process to define exactly what progress we've made on our specific commitments. That reporting process is templated. It's standardized internationally around the globe and requires specific public consultations to be able to feed into the development of the report.

Government Operations committee  Although the G-8 charter is from just 2013, we and U.S. both have been involved in developing open data for a bit longer than that. The G-8 charter had a couple of more specific commitments for G-8 members over the course of the next couple of years. In general, the U.S. had an early start on us.

Government Operations committee  It's difficult to say. They have just barely started. We've been at it for two or three years already. They have a ways to go to catch up.

Government Operations committee  No. They're well on their way. In fact, the CIC data sets are among the most popular metadata available on data.gc.ca. If you look at the list that I showed you before, the top 25, you see that eight or nine of the top 20 are CIC, and most of them are related to immigration statistics in one way or another.

Government Operations committee  Certainly. A group of five municipalities have been working together for longer than we've been working with the provincial government to share best practices on the delivery of open data: Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. They're all leaders in this area.

Government Operations committee  We've developed specific standardized criteria that departments must apply to data sets before they can contribute them to the open data initiative, to be able to identify data sets that cannot be distributed because of personal information, security information, privacy, confidentiality.

Government Operations committee  I think most of the Government of Canada external facing sites are subject to the same protection regime. The protection around data.gc.ca might be a little bit higher than other sites, but it is maintained outside of the firewall, not within the firewall of the Government of Canada.

Government Operations committee  They're included in the request. We have gone out to Crown corporations specifically when a data set has been requested from an external user. Our job is to see whether or not we can actually get that data. We've also sent out general requests for data out to Crown corporations but they won't be covered under the directive on open government.

Government Operations committee  We have a few data sets from Crown corporations now, but we also could conceivably make data available that we have not yet received from Crown corporations.

Government Operations committee  Our approach was to work with municipal governments in a variety of individual cities. In Edmonton for example, we would work with the office of the city clerk. In Edmonton they have quite a robust open data initiative of their own. We asked them, if they would, to help us contact local users—local companies, the post-secondary institutions, civil society organizations, and government representatives as well.