Government Operations committee  Before information is made available, we have to make sure that we are allowed to make it available. In some areas, information is circulated rather freely between various individuals with no consideration for who has rights, who is responsible and who is allowed to make the information available.

Government Operations committee  The specific directive has not been published yet. We have a draft that departments can consult and comment on. However, we use existing legislation. When we need to determine what constitutes confidential data, the Privacy Act applies. The same applies for other situations.

Government Operations committee  Under the process we follow, the deputy ministers must designate a person who is responsible for information management within their department. It is that individual, who is appointed by the deputy minister, who is responsible for telling us that the criteria are being met and that the information can be published.

Government Operations committee  I apologize but I cannot answer that question.

Government Operations committee  At the moment, the answer is no. The Government of Canada portal can only find data from the Government of Canada. However, through our international collaborations and through our national cooperation with the provinces and municipalities, we have discovered that this is something that users want.

Government Operations committee  The current agreement with the G8 aims to standardize data and metadata in such a way as to facilitate that sort of thing, but there is no agreement or commitment to create transparent links and navigation between the participating countries' data.

Government Operations committee  I can answer this part of the question. Yes, we ensure that all information contained in the portal and everything that can be directly searched is also available for search engines like Bing and Google. That means it is possible to get exactly the same results from the Google web page by using the same keywords.