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 en

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 b

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

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 comm

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 cha

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

Government Operations committee  I can't speak for the cities. My own research has really focused on the federal level, so I'm not quite sure what the municipalities are defining as their data sets. It would be logical that the federal government is the owner of quite larger amounts of data than the municipali

Government Operations committee  That's a bit of a tricky question, given my position as the independent researcher for the reporting mechanism that is part of the OGP. The independent reporting mechanism tries not to rank countries in terms of who is and who is not doing the best. You can see some reports out

Government Operations committee  I think the geospatial data was already out there. There was already a lot of it. What happened when the data.gc.ca portal went up is that the existing data sets got amalgamated and pushed into that common portal. A lot of the data on some of the areas that you mentioned and th

Government Operations committee  That I don't know. Treasury Board did say, during the course of the interviews, that there are efforts to expand the data on the portal but I don't know exactly what kind of data.

Government Operations committee  I'm not sure the open by default policy necessarily will have the greatest effect on open data. The open data initiative is really pushing data sets out there so it would be like, okay, if you have new data sets that are developed, then that information will automatically be made

Government Operations committee  I hope that they pay careful attention to the recommendations. They're not, specifically, my own feelings about open government, so they were largely based on what I heard from the majority of stakeholders and things that were supported by documentary analysis as well. I certainl

Government Operations committee  I have not met with anybody from Treasury Board.

Government Operations committee  I sent a letter. The way the OGP IRM process works is that the national governments get to see a copy of your report prior to it going public. They don't get to veto anything in there but they do get to say, “Hey, there's a factual error or a problem here”. So that process happen

Government Operations committee  That's really difficult. Different jurisdictions have approached it in different ways and I've been looking primarily at the national levels. I think really interesting things are going on at the municipal and provincial levels but most of my research is focused on the national l