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Thank you very much, and it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation. I'm very glad to see the interest on the part of the committee on the topic of open government.
My role at Deloitte is to lead our public sector industry practice for Canada, so we have quite a lot of interactions with governments across the country.
Open government has been a growing trend since about 2007. It appeared first at the local level, fuelled by a few things such as increased data from systems such as 311 systems, which provided a lot more information on municipal services than was available before. Many municipalities, starting with the City of New York, as many of you would know, began to publish that information online on their websites in terms of service calls and the status of service calls. It was used by citizen activists, particularly in the U.S., who wanted to look for ways to combine public information and public data to get everything from transit maps to street repair information to a whole range of possible uses of public information, and of course, it was used by councillors who wanted to be able to communicate through social media with city constituents.
So we saw it first at the municipal level. Washington, D.C., was the vanguard, back around 2007. It was an early and big adopter of the idea of releasing public data. We have seen cities across the U.S. and Canada and internationally follow suit, but national governments have also gotten involved. The U.S. federal government, the U.K. government, and the Australian government in particular have launched very significant initiatives in terms of providing public data to citizens through sites such as Data.gov, which is a major data platform or data clearing house of the U.S. government.
In the U.S., for example, since January 2000 the U.S. federal government has released 305,000 data sets onto their site. Something like 256 applications have been developed by citizens, not-for-profits, and others utilizing those data. Many of you will know that the U.K. is releasing public accounts information on a site they call COINS. They have released several million data items related to public expenditure information. We began to write about this in about 2008, and I think some of you have the document that we've produced, called “Unlocking Government: How Data Transforms Democracy”, with its provocative subtitle.
In Canada the municipal level has been embracing open government for some time. We see that Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, and a number of other cities have opened data sites.
At the provincial level it has been a bit slower. B.C. has recently announced their open government initiative and recently ran quite a successful campaign in connection with what they called action against climate change. They released some 500 data sets across, I think, four or five ministries, ran a competition to get citizens to come up with creative ways to develop applications to use that information, had private companies sponsor the event, came up with a number of applications that were developed, and awarded prizes. Overall it was very successful in terms of engaging citizens.
At the federal level, data have been traditionally available from a number of different sources. Examples include Natural Resources Canada, with their geospatial data, as well as Stats Canada, Environment Canada, and others. However, there has not been as comprehensive an approach as we've seen in some of the other federal jurisdictions, and the idea of a central clearing house of data has not yet taken hold, although I would assume that's likely to be introduced.
The final comment I would make is that leading governments have really taken a view that public data should be viewed as a public asset--that this is information that citizens, businesses, not-for-profits, and others should have access to and should be able to utilize creatively in terms of looking to improve public services and as a way to encourage citizen engagement, investment on the part of business, and innovation broadly.
That's all I have by way of opening comments. I'd be happy to field some questions following my colleagues.
Good afternoon. My name is Michael Geist. I'm a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where I hold the Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce law. By way of background, I serve on the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's expert advisory committee and on a number of boards, including the board of the Canadian Legal Information Institute, which is funded by Canadian law societies to provide free access to law. I'm also the editor of this new book on Canadian copyright and Bill , which includes several contributions that address access to public sector information. There is some overlap between some of the issues that we see taking place there and some of the issues you're thinking about.
That said, I appear today before this committee in my personal capacity. I am representing only my own views.
I'd like to thank the committee for the invitation to come and speak and also for taking on the open government issue. At a time when the digital economy strategy is gaining increasing attention, it is crucial to recognize that the federal government has an important role to play in the digital content realm by ensuring that its own content or the content produced on its behalf is readily and often freely available in digital form. After years of closed, walled-garden approaches, the world, as we've just heard, is embracing the benefits of openness, and as you've just heard and we know, a growing number of Canadian cities have adopted openness policies that establish a preference for open standards, open-source software, and open government.
I believe that the federal government should follow their lead. We've seen other countries do it, and do it quickly. In the United States there were 47 data sets available to the public in May 2009. As we just heard, a year and half later there are 305,000 of those data sets available. In Australia the government launched the Government 2.0 Taskforce in June 2009. The task force completed its work in less than a year, and the government responded in May of this year. All of this took place in the span of less than a year. The U.K. launched data.gov.uk at the start of this year. Today there are more than 5,000 data sets freely available and more than 100 apps that use the data to provide information on fuel and housing prices, air quality, and government spending.
However, rather than focusing my comments on the impressive achievements elsewhere, I thought I'd concentrate in my opening remarks on what might be seen as low-hanging fruit, two easy, low-cost or no-cost initiatives that could jump-start open government in Canada: crown copyright and CAIRS.
We'll start with crown copyright. It dates back to the 1700s. Crown copyright reflects a centuries-old perspective that government ought to control the public's ability to use official documents. Today crown copyright extends to 50 years from creation and requires anyone who wants to use or republish a government report, parliamentary hearing, or other work to first seek permission. While permission is often granted, it's not automatic. To obtain permission, the author or publisher has to provide details on the intended use, the format of the work, the specific website it's going to appear on online, and an estimate of the number of hard copies to be printed. If it's going to be sold commercially, they have to disclose the estimated selling price.
The Canadian approach stands in sharp contrast to what we see in the United States, where their federal government does not hold copyright over work created by an office or an employee as part of a person's official duties. Government reports, court cases, and Congressional transcripts can therefore be freely used and published. The existence of crown copyright affects both print and audiovisual worlds, and is increasingly viewed as a barrier to Canadian filmmaking, political advocacy, and educational publishing.
Beyond just the pure policy reasons for abandoning crown copyright, there are financial reasons for reform as well. The federal crown copyright system costs taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. According to documents that I obtained under access to information from Public Works and Government Services Canada, which administers the crown copyright system, in the 2006-07 fiscal year crown copyright licensing generated less than $7,000 in revenue, yet the system cost more than $200,000 to administer. In most instances, Canadians obtained little return for this investment.
About 95% of crown copyright requests are approved, with requests ranging from archival photos to copies, and this is true of the Copyright Act itself. More troubling were the 5% of cases in which permission was declined. While in some instances the refusals stemmed from the fact that the government didn't have the rights to the requested work, there was one instance in which an educational institution asked for permission to reproduce a photograph of a Snowbird airplane, but was denied on the grounds that the photo was to be used for an article raising questions about the safety of the program. Similarly, a request to reproduce a screen capture of the NEXUS cross-border program with the United States was declined because it was to be used in an article that wouldn't portray the program in a favourable light.
The ability to wield crown copyright has also arisen with respect to actual takedown notices. For example, just last year the Auditor General sent takedown demands to The Globe and Mail and Scribd, an online publishing site, after the newspaper posted one chapter from one of her reports. The office argued that crown copyright applies and that a written request for permission on a case-by-case basis is required.
Leaving aside the fact that this is arguably fair dealing--it's news reporting and consists of just one chapter in a larger report--the notion that Canadians need advance permission to reproduce or post a portion of a government report, I think, runs counter to the Auditor General's own efforts at government transparency and efficiency.
Similar issues can also arise in the context of video, possibly with respect to these very proceedings. In the spring of 2007, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, the well-known broadcasting advocacy group, began to post videos and podcasts of parliamentary committee proceedings on their website. When officials at the House of Commons caught wind of the activities, they sent a cease and desist letter demanding that the videos and podcasts be removed from the Internet. A lawyer from the House of Commons argued that posting excerpts from committee proceedings such as these could be treated as contempt of Parliament.
In an ideal world, this would be an issue that the Bill C-32 legislative committee would be addressing, since the abolition of crown copyright, as New Zealand has been proposing, would have been part of the copyright reform package. Since it isn't, I would argue that we ought to consider following the Australian model of leaving crown copyright in place but overlaying it with an open licensing approach. That would mean government would maintain copyright but would freely license the use of the work for reuse, with no need for further permission or compensation. Only attribution would be required.
Similar approaches have been adopted in the U.K., which has seen the development of an open government licence, while others have called for the creation of a crown commons licence. Whatever you call it, the approach would provide an efficient means of freeing up government works without the need for legislative change.
Second, I'd like to touch briefly on CAIRS and access to information. As this committee well knows, in 2008 the CAIRS database, which provided information on prior access to information requests, was discontinued. This committee passed a resolution calling for its reinstatement, and the Information Commissioner has done the same.
In 2009 I launched CAIRS.Info, a site that provides access to searchable PDF copies of the same information that was contained in the CAIRS database. I have sent requests to most government departments each quarter for a list of the most recent access to information requests. The resulting documents are then uploaded and can be searched by government department, date of request, or keyword. The site is still available, but it's now out of date. It has proven difficult to maintain, given the need for quarterly requests to dozens of government departments, followed by digitization and uploading of those materials.
I'd argue that the solution is obvious. Not only should we reinstate CAIRS, but we should also make the records from all access to information requests freely available online, in machine-readable format.
This follows the U.K. example. In October of this year, Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude told a Conservative Party conference that their freedom of information act will be amended so that all data released must be in reusable and machine-readable format. The change in the U.K. will mean that freedom of information data will be, and I quote, “available to everyone and able to be exploited for social and commercial purposes”. I believe the closest we come to that in Canada right now is the Department of National Defence, which lists all completed access to information requests on its website and invites the public to request a copy informally at no cost. That's a start, but it's not as good as we can and should do.
In conclusion, this is by no means the full solution. Rather, it is a modest starting point. There's open data, open access to research, open source software initiatives, and many other possibilities. Like many others, I believe that our goal should be to maximize open government. In doing so, we reduce costs, unleash economic value, increase transparency, and generate greater public confidence in our democratic institutions. I look forward to your questions.
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Thank you all for allowing me to appear in front of you. It's a nice treat. I've never spoken in such a beautiful room. I wonder if that fireplace works.
My name is Eric Sauve, and I'm vice-president at a local company called Newsgator. I suppose I'm here to represent an entrepreneurial voice in the discussion on why you would bother going down this road of open government.
In terms of my experience, I'm a vice-president at Newsgator. I was formerly the CEO of a company called Tomoye, which was recently acquired, and I sit on a few boards of start-up engineering companies that basically produce software.
My experience in the government space has been, over the last decade, in providing these types of software solutions to government, primarily in the United States but also to certain government agencies in Canada. I've had the privilege of being able to support probably about half a million government users working in the realm of collaborative government, open government, and that kind of stuff.
I was invited here to speak as an entrepreneur. My message for you today is that it's important to think about open government as an economic issue, not a political issue. Aside from access to information and all of these things advocacy organizations might be interested in with respect to the workings of government, in a modern economy, in an information economy, data are basically what creates companies.
One of the easiest examples to think of is Google. Google has no data. What it does is create a valuable service for people by using other people's data. It makes it readable. It does interesting things with it. It creates visualizations for it.
I would argue, and my experience is, that in fact open government should be viewed as a way to create economic wealth in this country. Information and data are really a kind of modern resource that companies can tap into to produce economic value and jobs.
What I'm going to do is walk you through just a couple of examples of interesting uses of open data that have created economic value.
There's a website called CrimeReports.com. For those who are not familiar with it, you can check it out online. Essentially, it takes local crime data, puts it on a map, and allows citizens to see what crime is happening in their area. A company was formed to provide that service, and that creates jobs.
Another example, which is a little bit more of a historical example but that I think is useful nonetheless, is the Weather Network. Companies don't collect data on weather. That's provided by the government. Of course, anyone who's on the Internet sees weather data everywhere. It's a big engine to draw people onto sites and keep them connected to sites. Of course, that can produce economic value in terms of the products they buy or the advertising they consume on the sides of those sites. I don't know exactly how many people work in the weather industry, but that industry certainly wouldn't be possible if it weren't for open data.
Another example, a more local example, is a website called Zoocasa.com. This is a site owned by Rogers Media, and it competes with the MLS site. Basically they take real estate listings and combine them with census data to provide a full picture of the neighbourhood people might want to move into. They see the house they want to buy, and then they can see the schools and maybe reports on how well those schools are doing. They can see the makeup, financial and otherwise, of the community they might move into. That's a really valuable service, because obviously it helps people to make more informed decisions about the houses they might buy.
The economic lens on that is increased competition. We all know that MLS is a site we all go to, and maybe it's a good idea if there are other sites. Economic value is created through competition. Of course, that competition is driven by producing that interesting value that consumers want to see. They want to see the full picture, as opposed to just what they get on MLS.
Another example is a company called PASSUR Aerospace. They take open air traffic control data and data that they collect as well about airplanes and their current trajectories and resell those data as a service to airline companies so that they can better predict when planes are going to land and, as a result, when they're going to take off. Of course, that has tremendous value to airline companies, because unless they can achieve the logistical perfection that's required to manage those huge operations, they're losing money all the time.
Google Maps is another and more famous example of value that's being created using government data. Another example, let's not forget, is the whole industry that has come out of GPS. It was Reagan's decision to basically make it possible for commercial entities to use GPS data, to get satellite signals and use them to create devices that.... Those of you who have phones may have bought an exercise app that uses GPS data. That's one small example of an industry created around data that were collected by government and made open for commercial gain.
In closing, I would say that I don't know a tremendous amount about government, but I think government has been essentially collecting data about all aspects of Canadians and Canadian topography—Canada, generally speaking—since Canada was created. The more we can start to think about making those data available and think about it from a perspective of economic value, jobs creation, and enterprise creation, the more we're doing a great service to the people of this country.
That's it.
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Yes, I think at times there are. Depending on the type of data, there can be differences between the federal, provincial, and local levels.
I'm thinking, for example, that it's a good opportunity to reference what exists right now with legal information. I would hope most people would agree that of all the sorts of data that ought to be made freely available, court cases and statutes are certainly towards the very top of the list. Citizens can't possibly be expected to follow the law if they don't actually have access to the law. That's why CanLII, the organization on whose board I sit, was established by lawyers across the country, who pay out of their dues every year a certain amount of money to help make legal materials freely available.
The approach that is taken at the federal level is different from what some provinces take, and different again from what some municipalities take. We can debate the importance of local bylaws and other municipal-related materials, but surely both federal and provincial information is critically important.
I'm a new member of the board, but I know that CanLII has faced issues, particularly at the provincial level, because some provinces even see access to things like provincial statutes as a potential revenue opportunity and thus create restrictions for people to be able to access that information. We are just talking about the laws that people like you help enact.
There are some differences, and I think that if we were to move forward on whether to call it open government or open data and we're talking about universal access to law in a free format—which I think is absolutely essential—there is a role to play in ensuring that not just the federal government but also various provinces are on board as well.
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You asked first about translation.
I'm not an expert on the Official Languages Act who would know just how far or how broadly those implications would go. To highlight one of the examples I raised in terms of things like committee proceedings and the like, which are made available in both languages and are being translated right now, I do know that it's already translated material. It's translated work. In this case, it's either audio or video, and it's being translated in real time, so the notion of allowing the public to use that sort of material for alternative purposes strikes me as obvious. The notion that one might be held in contempt of Parliament, so to speak, if one used those materials without permission strikes me as wholly inappropriate.
With respect to Bill C-32, crown copyright isn't touched by that bill. The issue was raised by a number of groups during the copyright consultation held in the summer of 2009. I don't know if that's a huge surprise. I appeared before the committee studying Bill C-32 last week and I spoke of the legislation, in many areas, quite favourably. I think there are issues that ought to be addressed, but in the absence of crown copyright being dealt with in Bill C-32, there is still an opportunity to deal with it outside the legislative framework and to provide, effectively, the same level of access from a public perspective without the need for prior permission.
On its part, Bill C-32 would deal with things such as researchers' notes, let's say, if you were dealing within a legislative or House of Commons committee, and these would also be subject to crown copyright in the same way that almost anything else produced by government would be.
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I have a few different ways to answer that question.
The standard for transparency has increased substantially in the past 24 months or so. The idea of a transparent and accountable government certainly has been around for a long time. What we're seeing with respect to the Internet age is that citizens have a much higher expectation for transparency. I'll use the example of scorecards that are produced by government.
In the health care sector, for example, there are wait times. Governments historically would produce scorecards or performance indicators, and that would be the idea of a transparent approach to results. Today citizens want to understand what data went into the scorecard. They don't want to see the bar graph; they want to see the raw data. They want to make their own decisions as to whether or not what's reported by government is supported by the facts and the data. What you're seeing increasingly is that citizens are asking for the underlying fact base that went into the report.
Now, not all citizens are able to analyze and manipulate that information, so in a way you're in a bit of a catch-22, because other citizens actually want the report because they don't have the capacity to go off and analyze data and create their own. This is what we're seeing, for example, at the provincial level in the education area. The education area is a good example. Community groups are starting to get together to look at the data available across government programs and put together their own report cards on school performance. They want, for instance, to combine data on teachers making salaries of $100,000 or more with what the average student score is in the classroom.
Ministries of education are finding they'll have reports on school bus utilization. A parent group will say, “I'm standing on the street corner and I'm seeing the bus go by. That bus looks full to me. I don't know why you think it's not full and why we have to collapse the route. Could you please give us the data that you're using to determine that the buses are full?” It's increasingly difficult for governments to say that they're not going to give them those data. Once you start down that path, it becomes a matter of getting the next piece of data, and the next piece of data, and now they can combine data from five or six different sources and create their own scorecard.
That's what citizens want when they talk about open government: open data. That's what citizens are after.
What you find is this: if the U.S. releases 304,000 or 305,000 data sets, or if B.C. releases 500 data sets for the purpose of their environmental contest, it gets very difficult for governments to justify why they're not releasing 501 or, if they have 500 data sets, why they released just 499. If they had 300,000, why did they only release 250?
It's a philosophy. If it fits a certain kind of criterion, we're going to make it available. It's easier to default to why it's not being made available than to justify every single data set that's made available. You can split hairs on open government, open data, unlocked government, etc., but it's really a question of trying to get to what citizens in today's Internet world expect of their governments with respect to transparency.
I'm sure the Liberals can find some way to do some financial gymnastics to make sure that we don't, but I won't try to answer your rhetorical question.
During the conversation today I've certainly become more convinced that it would be preferable to call it open data rather than open government. I think all of you have agreed that there are pieces of government information that, for many reasons, need to be kept confidential, whether those documents relate to cabinet, international trade, or foreign affairs. I think there may be a misconception on the part of people that when you say open government, it means that everything cabinet is discussing will automatically be open and available online, which you've confirmed for me today is not the case.
I want to go back to the crown copyright question for just a bit. Currently it's possible to reproduce sections, paragraphs, and reasonable amounts of information. I know that in reproducing it within a report or document, there's a risk of intentionally misquoting what the original said. That's probably very rare. I'll acknowledge that. If that were to happen, it would be fairly easy, in my opinion, to go back and compare it to the original and see that in these two paragraphs, for instance, three words are changed and the intent has been changed.
If you have the possibility of reproducing the entire document, is there a risk at all of misrepresenting what the entire document may have said? It may be seen by multiple people, maybe dozens of people, who would assume that it is in its original format, whereas in fact it has been altered. Is that a risk, or doesn't it worry you at all?
Aside from the data of the Department of National Defence, the Privy Council Office and, in some cases, the international trade department, information should be available to the public. I may have overlooked other cases. Data related to the environment, government operations and public accounts should be disclosed automatically. Anyone looking for information should be able to access it immediately.
Do you share that view, or do you think having to wait years with nothing to show for it is acceptable?
As I said earlier, when we were talking about open government, there are some cases.... There are members who deal with files such as National Defence, and you never hear another thing about those files. No one asks questions. Everyone is aware of what goes on, and no one is. Four members take an oath to deal with that portfolio, and that is the end of it. That is fine. At least, there are some people who know what is going on. The same goes for the Privy Council Office. Some data need to remain confidential, and I have no problem with that.
But when it comes to everything else, including the environment, if someone wants to know what the government has done in that area, why would you not disclose that information? That is what I call a lack of transparency.
What do you think, Mr. Sauve?
He does not like it when I ask him questions.
Some hon. members: Ha, ha!