Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, the political staffers have no authority under the Access to Information Act. They have no delegation of authority under the Access to Information Act to make any decisions about access to information.

Information & Ethics committee  They can review matters for information purposes, but they certainly should not be involved and they have no legal authority to be involved in making decisions about disclosure of information under the Access to Information Act.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, that is in large part what the difference is. The other thing is that there's usually a centralized portal. The data they have on government is everything the institutions have been asked to disclose as part of the open government initiative in a central portal.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, but it's also one central website where you can access all this information as opposed to going through each government institution. It's very similar, if you want to think about it, to what the federal government did with Service Canada in terms of program operations, where they have a one-stop shop.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. The idea with this open government initiative, with some of these databases, is that it's a one-stop shop.

Information & Ethics committee  The Australians commissioned a task force, and the task force issued a report in December 2009. The task force was composed of experts in the field, and they produced this report where they make recommendations to the government. To my knowledge, the government has not yet implemented it.

Information & Ethics committee  In my own understanding of the definition of proactive disclosure, open government is taking it to a different level.

Information & Ethics committee  They're in the process at Treasury Board Secretariat of revamping all of their policy suite in terms of access to information, with guidelines and directives. They also have their records-keeping policy, which is relevant to this, because if you have proper records management and proper information management practices, it's a lot easier to proactively disclose information.

Information & Ethics committee  As I said, I haven't done the full spectrum of review on this, but in my view, certainly in terms of access to information and of information management, records keeping, and the Archives Act, privacy is going to be an issue, and security is going to be an issue, but I don't think we should consider that these issues are insurmountable.

Information & Ethics committee  It depends on the different data sets. Open government in the U.S. has a variety of data sets. You'd have to look into it.

Information & Ethics committee  They have all the financial spending data, as you would if you looked at a financial statement and had all of the disaggregated data and could actually use it, because it's in a format whereby you can use different technological applications and do different graphs—

Information & Ethics committee  I didn't conduct a detailed analysis, Madam Chair, of the data set that's available in the U.S., but it's essentially the distinction between a static disclosure of information and an open government disclosure of information. It's that you have access to the raw data and can conduct analysis.

Information & Ethics committee  Okay. Madam Chair, the best person to give that specific response to the member is Jennifer Bell of VisibleGovernment.ca. She is here in Ottawa. She has basically looked at the two different portals concerning stimulus spending as between the Canadian experience and the American experience.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, one of the differences you can actually look at in Canada is the website I mentioned in my presentation in terms of open parliament. The difference between Hansard and that portal is that with Hansard you'll have to do a search to look for a member's name and everything this person has done.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, and in fact, if the committee is interested, the Deloitte article I mentioned—I didn't bring it because it's in unilingual format—is a wonderful piece of work that goes through what we used to have when we started public government and what the situation is now. They call it the legacy, the learning, and the leading.