Information & Ethics committee  As I said, in my view, whatever is in the control of a federal institution is subject to the Access to Information Act. It would be a question as to whether or not what's in the minister's office or what's in a political staffer's notes would be covered by the Access to Informati

Information & Ethics committee  What we've seen in Canada, at the municipal level, are various developments of programs that have been of service to citizens and that would not have been developed by the municipal governments. So at the municipal level, they have schedules for bus routes. With having the inform

Information & Ethics committee  I have 2,100 complaints, give or take a few, at this point. So far this year, I've received about 1,100. It's high. I am concerned this year because it's still high. We're going back to levels of two years ago. Last year we had about 1,600, which means that it's difficult for us

Information & Ethics committee  No, I don't.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, Mr. Chairman....

Information & Ethics committee  The only thing I would say, Mr. Chair, is that in terms of how the act works, I respond to specific complaints about the disclosure of information in documents. I also have the power to initiate investigations, but the act states that I have to have reasonable grounds. Rumours wo

Information & Ethics committee  In terms of disclosing access to information requests, ideally they should all be posted and there should be a central, searchable database.

Information & Ethics committee  The last information I have is four. There may be a few that I'm not aware of at this point, but--

Information & Ethics committee  We read about the United States every day in our newspaper clippings. There are all sorts of initiatives. During our “Right to Know” week, we had people from the government, the national archivist, and he talked about the new data sets, Register 2.0, which basically allow people

Information & Ethics committee  It's part of a spectrum. When I was here last, one thing I did say was that the way our legislation is structured, if you look at the purpose clause of the Access to Information Act, it basically says that the default mode is to make an access to information request, in essence.

Information & Ethics committee  This is an area where you would really benefit from hearing from experts in the field of open government. Policy experts can explain it to you much better than I can. Essentially, when you publish data it comes with conditions. In Canada we have crown copyright. It's very diffe

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know what conditions are applied. I think use is restricted. However, open government advocates would tell you that they want the data to be out there and then they can show you what they can do with it once they have the ability to manipulate the data and reuse it and re

Information & Ethics committee  One initiative I'm aware of is that Immigration Canada started proactively publishing information online. I had actually sent a letter of congratulations to the minister at the time because I thought that was a very good initiative. We get a lot of access requests. Citizenship an

Information & Ethics committee  I think open government now is pretty much a term that's accepted, in terms of the vocabulary that's being used. Open government has now come to be known to mean this different type of governance. But as I said, if you go into the details--and I'm certainly not an expert in all t

Information & Ethics committee  I'm looking at my notes for one of the things the CIO is producing, because they have a list of what they would consider a first step in the types of information. That would be a good way to start. If I remember correctly, they talk about statistical data. Statistical data, fre