Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, committee, for having us here. You have our submission and there are a number of links in it to related documents. I won't take you through that. I'll just raise some of the points in there, and hopefully that will leave more time for questions on what is a very important piece of legislation.

Information & Ethics committee  What we've heard here today from our various perspectives is that when we're talking about open government, we're talking about information. It's more than raw data; it's information. We also recognize that in addition to receiving more information in a useful form from government, we have to be able to get information that we're not able to find.

Information & Ethics committee  The question of Crown copyright has caused problems for us. You heard Professor Geist talk about it too. The program does not let the federal government recover a lot of money. It is not really very useful for the government as a source of revenue, but there is a good deal of risk in trying to use it as a way to restrict protected information.

Information & Ethics committee  It should be done according to the Access to Information Act; it is protected. You have the right to ask for your own information…

Information & Ethics committee  I think there has to be a balancing. We want information to be more publicly available and we want to reduce the number of redundant requests. But at the same time, as we've seen with BC Ferries and other organizations, they've either said they will put up media requests—not a really good indication that you're trying to be transparent—or they only put up the requests and they don't do anything else with respect to transparency.

Information & Ethics committee  And it's unfortunate, because, again, in terms of discussing public issues, normally somebody would put in an FOI or an ATI request because they were interested in an area and they needed more information to explain how it works. If you create a system in which there is essentially a race for who can hit the button faster, it's like a TV game show: who can get their story out there quickly?

Information & Ethics committee  There are competing issues, but there is a legal duty under the Access to Information Act and section 4 and section 6 of the B.C. act. The duty is to the requester, and I think it's something we're going to have to deal with.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll try to go through it very briefly. Our initial reaction was cautiously optimistic when we heard they were going to be putting requests up online because this is a good thing. The CAIRS system existed federally, and that, as I noted in my written brief, should be replaced. But as more and more details became available, it became increasingly obvious that the system was designed not so much to increase transparency as to really make things difficult for certain requesters.

Information & Ethics committee  I think it's also important to not try to reinvent the wheel. Under the Access to Information Act, we've looked at a number of important governmental and societal issues. In the instance of public safety, obviously we don't want organized crime to be able to put in an ATI request to the RCMP saying, “I want a list of all informants in the United Nations Gang.”

Information & Ethics committee  I just have a very short comment. One is that you should not rely exclusively--I don't expect that you will--on Twitter and Facebook. The other thing is to come back to a theme that Mr. Hume and Mr. Wallace raised earlier, which is that you constantly need to go back and see what people are saying and what new information they might want, changes they might want to see.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. It has to be available, we think, to citizens. It can't just be the digerati. It can't just be people who are sophisticated users. It has to be available to citizens. It has to be in a format they are able to use. I'm assuming that the 250,000 pages were all in 10-point courier type as well, for ease of reading.

Information & Ethics committee  The federal government does not provide a lot of services directly to the public, apart from those provided to veterans and First Nations. But billions of tax dollars are transferred between levels of government, between federal and provincial levels and other bodies. Things like the amount of money, the objectives for it, and reports from the other governments on how federal funds have been used, and why, will all give us an idea of how well our federal system is working.

Information & Ethics committee  I feel that Canadians have to be able to get involved. If we create an open government system, every Canadian has to have access to it. It is not just about finding a computer in a library and sitting down at it. It has to be in a useful form that people can use without a degree in computer science.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, members of the committee, for inviting us. I presume to provide a somewhat cautionary note amidst all the optimism. We do applaud the committee for taking up the cause of open government, although we note that the very first episode of the BBC television series, Yes Minister was entitled “Open Government”, and it featured this exchange between the two lead characters, Bernard Woolley and Sir Humphrey Appleby, whose equivalent would be deputy minister: Bernard Woolley: “But surely the citizens of a democracy have a right to know.”

Information & Ethics committee  Ah. Okay. What has come to be known as “open government”--the enhanced availability of data to the public through electronic means--will hopefully allow anyone interested in a subject area to be able to do better research, provide better input to public consultations, and improve their representations to government as a result.