:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to start off by first thanking the committee for asking me to testify. I think this is my fifth testimony in eight years. I appreciate the opportunity to speak on behalf of our membership.
I'll start by telling you a little bit about the Canadian Institute of Forestry or l'Institut forestier du Canada. It's a national non-profit association of forest practitioners and professionals, but also very much natural resource and integrated land managers, people who are responsible ultimately for making sure that forestry and natural resource management is well done on the land base across Canada.
We have about 2,700 members—maybe closer to 2,800 members—in all provinces and territories. We're organized in 19 sections. We've been around for about 106 years.
The principal mandate of the institute is continuing education and professional development for our members, making sure that we keep forest professionals or practitioners competent and up to date on the latest science and research that comes out across Canada from many sources and from around the world. We're very much into knowledge exchange and extension work. We are constantly, across our 19 sections, holding various events—conferences, workshops, seminars, field tours, courses—all intended to help our members stay competent and be on top of things forestry-related and natural resources-related.
We are also responsible and very much cognizant of the need to speak out objectively, constructively, and with balance on forestry and natural resources management issues and challenges. That sets us apart, much of the time. It seems that every month or every few weeks we will speak out through a media release, an editorial, or an appropriate letter to government, industry, or academia that puts us in a position to comment positively and constructively on even the most difficult forestry-related issues and try to come up with and offer solutions to these issues and challenges.
It's not always easy, with a membership of 2,700 or 2,800, but somehow we manage to do it, and collectively we have been the voice of forest practitioners for many decades.
That, in essence, is the institute. We're growing and expanding our membership; we've developed programs that allow us to communicate well the outputs and results of good science and research through publications, through webinars and e-lectures, and through all sorts of national initiatives.
What interested me about testifying to this committee is that so much of what we do and so much of what we offer to our members and to our partners and affiliates as well is based on or has a foundation in having access to good quality data in every respect, whether it comes from university science and research or from government sources or from what in essence companies or industry collect by way of data. Very often it is cooperatives that collect data and store it, maintain it, and distribute it. I see more and more of that across Canada, and I think it's a very good model.
I just learned about a data cooperative in Alberta that looks at growth in yield—measurements in the forest to determine how well and how fast trees are growing. Everyone was doing their own thing until recently.
The groups there got together—the companies, the Government of Alberta, other interested parties—and were able in essence to pool their resources, their time, their effort to make something that was rather disparate and not all that cooperative work really well. The result saves money and time, and you have better data not only to manage the forest for timber and fibre, but also to manage the ecosystems and the ecology and maintain the social licence to do all those things—the biodiversity, the wildlife habitat.
I'm very keen on that sort of model and open sharing of data. I could give lots of examples from across the country and from other countries as well for which I've become familiar with how they handle these sorts of things and what they do.
I know that the mandate of this committee goes beyond natural resource and forestry types of data, but that sort of information and the groundwork that is there is the basis of much of the prosperity of this country in terms of making good business decisions—everything from where to place or build a mill or add a new line in a mill to the way we manage the forest for the sake of the water, the wildlife, the habitat, the biodiversity—all those sorts of things. It's essential to good forest management and to modern interdisciplinary forestry, which is far more than just extraction now.
It has evolved in the last few decades—in the last century, as a matter of fact—to be something that allows us, as the saying goes, to have our cake and eat it too. With good forestry, we can have economic prosperity, keep ecological processes maintained and sometimes enhanced, and have social stability. All is based on good data and the information you can derive from that data.
Our institute is very much involved in that sort of endeavour. Our members individually in their jobs are involved in it. We as an organization promote as much as possible and where possible the open sharing of data. We like the idea of portals.
There are always proprietary issues. Scientists and researchers who want to publish based on data they've collected might want to keep it under wraps for a while until they get to the point that they publish it, and they need some security. Certainly privacy issues and that sort of thing come into play, and often it's an issue that depends on who has paid for it or who has been involved in its development and production. But in general, as much as possible we like to see natural resources and forestry data openly shared. It's for the betterment of forest management.
I don't really have much else to say in my opening statement, but that sums up what we're about, what we do, and what we believe.
:
It's a pleasure to speak with you here today.
This is something that has been close to me for quite some time. I've spent, really, my entire career in the information field, from the standpoint of an analyst seeking macro information to understand the top-down workings of the economy and society, creating micro information on the behaviours of individuals and businesses as they work through, and also, from a bottom-up perspective with CFIB, representing the interests of small-business owners who are looking for relevant information on how to bolster their chances of growth and success, and so on.
Incidentally, my first job after graduation in the early eighties was working for a third party database company reselling StatCan databases and other forms of databases. Part of my job was teaching people how to access this information and use it within their business context.
I also have a long history working with StatCan. I was part of their working group on small-area data in the early nineties, and that was how they could publish information right down to very specific areas geographically that would be useful for small businesses. I worked with them on small-business connectedness issues—that is, the people who were beginning to access the Internet, develop their own interconnected techniques, and so on. Again, it was a big issue back in the mid-nineties.
I've certainly lobbied government for decades to remove the paywall that StatCan had around CANSIM and many of the other databases and information products it had, especially where the marginal cost of providing that information had fallen to zero. The information was already there; therefore, there was very little cost to making it available to people, and we knew that our members were not using the information on a per-database or a per-data series point of view.
I was also very pleased in the past couple of years that StatCan has made this available now for free, and I'm sure I'd be very interested to see what their usage numbers have been as a result of that. I think there has probably been a tremendous increase in utilization of this important resource.
Partway through my discussions with them in the past, starting as an analyst looking at information about small firms, I really recommended that they start looking at getting information for small firms. They have a different set of needs that are out there. We're hoping that information can be available to them that makes the most sense for their particular context.
Most currently, I'm also a member of the business to business committee at the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association of Canada, working with them to develop products and services to help businesses understand other businesses. Not all firms deal in the consumer space, but they do need to understand not just their consumer marketplace but also the products, the businesses, their competitors, and so on.
My perspective on this issue is that Canada has long lagged behind other countries, particularly the U.S., in publishing free or low-cost information that could help in aiding businesses and their understanding of the economy. We've really raised here a couple of generations of business owners who have been, effectively, trained not to look for this kind of information. They've never known that it was available. They haven't worked it into their own business strategies and understandings and so on. It's going to take some time for them to realize.
There has been some progress in the past couple of years, and I'm happy to see that. But I think it's still taking time for that kind of realization to sink in. We're hoping that successive products and perhaps some third party businesses will better help to bring this information into the marketplace.
We certainly know that the cost puts custom data from private sources really out of the reach of small firms. Most of the custom business-to-business data services by the private industry are really working towards the big business sector, and small firms don't typically get that information. The information is costly to get. But you really don't understand its value. You can't judge its value until after you've acquired it and then tried it within your own business. That can be a long process, and it really provides a large wall in front of any firm that's looking for information to try to make the business better.
We also understand that the smaller the business, the less relevant that aggregate macro-data gets. It doesn't make sense for a small firm to understand more detailed information, say, on gross domestic product, aggregate employment levels by province, or whatever. The smaller the firm, the more details begin to matter, really granular information by very small sector, city, town, or neighbourhood, trying to understand their marketplace. Their focus tends to be on very limited geographic areas, and those are the kinds of data that would make most sense for small firms. Really, what they're looking for is information on their customers, products, and competitors.
In putting some notes together for this presentation, I've put a few thoughts into what the keys to success are in this. I've looked at data.gc.ca; I'm very happy to see that. I also see that the publishing dataset goals are helpful, but the value will come from how often they're used, and I'm hoping you'll be able to work through the monitoring of the usage of the access of this information as one of your metrics in this particular project.
Data that helps people or businesses link publicly available data with their own privately held information is also crucial. I think the geo-spatial information is going to be pretty important here. Boundary files are not generally available easily, depending on what kind of software you're using, of course. But we need to see publicly available geo-spatial boundary files, not just at the census metropolitan area, but at almost every level of geographic disaggregation, including federal ridings and definitely down to the city, town, and neighbourhood levels.
We also think forward-looking data is much more important than backward-looking data. History is important, but looking at much of the economy depends on identifying trends that deviate from history. That's where small firms are perhaps of real benefit to the economy; they identify these kinds of trends first. So if the information can be put up that.... It's hard to predict this, but that's really the kind of source information they're looking for, something that provides them with an insight that hasn't been available to others.
In terms of the emergence of information value adders—and this can be with many small firms as well—that provide the value-added information to these databases and then distribute to customers who they understand much better, I think the government can do a great deal in terms of getting the word out about this information and what's available. But getting it into the marketplace, especially the business marketplace, is going to need the help of some intermediaries. We think that encouraging them to take part and develop products along those lines is very helpful.
We've learned lessons in terms of how macro people look at the world and information versus how micro people look at it. A good example is an initiative by CFIB called Small Business Saturday. We asked our members if they wanted to offer particular deals or promotions in their businesses for a particular Saturday in October, and then we would publish that information on a website. Customers would be able to go to that website and search by neighbourhood or type of business what they're looking for. We structured it by industry type, and that was the way we always tended to look at the information. But what we learned very quickly was that customers tend not to look at it by industry. They're not trained to look at it by nix codes and so on. They look at things by product. They're interested in buying shoes or in looking for lawn mowers; they don't tend to look at it by type of store, but they really go right down to their need of what products they're looking for.
So that helped us in structuring information in the way that the consumer was most interested in receiving it.
Certainly quality also matters. CFIB has had some semi-bad experience with the federal riding and postal code data because there were numerous errors within that database that Statistics Canada provides. Therefore boundary files would be a welcome improvement on that. It would really help in dealing with those kinds of issues.
Also getting more to what CFIB is looking for, drawing more levels of government into this process would be very helpful. Standardization on governance and financial information is pretty critical. We've noted that the Alberta government did a major departure from standard budget accounting that makes it very difficult to look at their province's fiscal performance over a number of years and very difficult to compare with other provinces as a result. Municipalities are all over the map in the way that they present their financial information.
We also know that pre-built two-dimensional or three-dimensional tables don't always work terribly well with providing information. Therefore we think micro-data is the way to go as much as possible, as long as privacy and confidentiality is maintained within this sort of database. Micro-data allows the customer to be able to cut or aggregate information along the lines that they're really looking for.
We're also missing relevant data that would really assist policy-makers. Tax incidence studies are all but impossible because Statistics Canada just has been unable to clean their corporate dataset sufficiently to be able to get back other information. Property tax policy is a mess because of the lack of standardized information collected from the local levels.
So I think there's an awful lot of progress being made and we're very happy to see this initiative, but we also know that there's a great deal of opportunity for future work. We're happy to help out along those lines.
Thank you very much.
:
That's a very good question. I don't think at the federal level our members would say they've been that frustrated. We work with the Great Lakes Forestry Centre, for instance; the Atlantic Forestry Centre, the Pacific Forestry Centre; the Northern Forestry Centre; and the Canadian Wood Fibre Centre. Our institute has a lot of connections to some very excellent government departments in the Canadian Forest Service. FPInnovations is a government-run company.
I think what happens, in general, at the federal level is the science and research there is published, and that's great. What maybe tends to be problematic is when there are partnerships or cooperative research undertakings where data is produced, and some of the organizations have paid some money or membership dues to produce that work, that data, the outputs, and results of that research, and it tends to be restricted a lot of the time to the members who have paid. That's where there's a little bit of a problem.
And I can understand that to some degree. If you're in a cooperative arrangement where it's government, industry, academia—quite a few players—and some of those players are paying money up front to get the science and research done, they might have a proprietary right. I'm not saying it's definite or absolute, but at least it's to get it first or to receive what they paid for. That's where there are some problems, but, in general, with the federal government and the Forest Service, and these other organizations I've named, it's been a pretty good relationship, and there's a really good sharing of information there.
:
Sure. Those are all good questions. It's very difficult to provide forward-looking information because you don't know the future. You don't have data on the future of course.
But what we heard from members, particularly on StatsCan industry survey information and so on, is that timeliness tends to be an issue. They are getting information about a sector that's now two or three years old. Are they getting a whole lot of information out of that? This is the difficulty with any sort of data collector, and we have had long discussions with StatsCan on this to find solutions.
We thank them for taking this very seriously. But the good information about industries and sectors can only come from industries or businesses, and people filling out these surveys. The difficulty level can be quite high, and the burden can be quite high.
To a large degree and as much as it is able, StatsCan is getting administrative data from other sources—CRA and so on—and trying to keep the load as light as possible on the smallest businesses, particularly those in smaller economic areas, whether it's smaller provinces, the territories, and so on.
If you want more complete information about a sector, you actually have to go survey them, and that puts more of a burden on collecting information. This is one of the reasons why we really pushed for getting free information back to the businesses because if they were providing this information for free to government, then at least they should be getting this information back as quickly as possible and without cost as well. They are the ones providing much of the data that is then being repackaged, and developed, and so on.
So yes, we understand. I did say forward-looking but....
:
It's a really good question. I'll give my personal perspective on it.
I've worked both in industry and government in several provinces prior to my position with the Canadian Institute of Forestry. The one thing that always seemed to dominate was the cost of getting good data. Really it's an investment. We have to get our mindset changed to that.
It was often a hot potato as a result of that mindset that it is a cost only. Something liked a forest inventory, which is the basis, is a snapshot of what the forest looks like right now, but moving forward you project, you model, you determine what it's going to look like in the future, what you can sustainably harvest, and how you can maintain the ecosystems, and all that. It is an investment in understanding your business moving forward.
That hot potato bounces back and forth. Sometimes it's the industry responsible for gathering that data and producing the inventories and the datasets. Sometimes it's the government. Sometimes it's a combination of both, but it's because it's seen as a cost rather than an investment.
If I could make a perfect world in the forest sector and enable the development of things like sustainable biomass or bioenergy and all of the new products we're looking at, and the whole rejigging of the forest sector that's coming down the pipe, I would somehow make it so that data could be produced, it would be seen as an investment cooperatively, and it would be openly available to entrepreneurs, companies, and people who hold tenure, as well as the government regulators and the staff who are trying to help manage and monitor what's going on.
I hope that's relevant, but that's how I see it.
:
Again, thanks, Jay, and thanks for your comments on the institute. It's great for our national office to be located in your riding
. We've worked on some things before with the biomass and bioenergy side of things, so I use that as an example. But even coarse-level data that tells interested parties or entrepreneurs what's possible, what's available in biomass, for instance, in a forest and what can be sustainably harvested, we've got lots of metrics on that, lots of good understanding on sustainability and what we can take and what we can leave to ensure ecosystem process and that sort of thing.
But even at a coarse level, if that were available for entrepreneurs, say, through a national forest inventory, and I know the Canadian Forest Service has worked on that for many years maintaining and keeping that up to date, that would help. They might get an idea, and of course, you'd have to temper it or look at it in the context of what else is there and that would probably be some socio-economic data, what mills are there, what population base, and that sort of thing, what is possible in terms of biomass harvesting. New York state, for instance, has a very open data policy on that type of availability.
I think it was a biomass session at Queen's University that I attended a few years ago that encouraged the entrepreneurial spirit and at least the planning of the examination of what was possible in biomass harvest and getting the bioeconomy up and running.
And thank you, guests, for being here.
One of the things we decided when we wanted to figure out what kind of witnesses would be relevant for this study was to determine who the customers were. Any time you're doing a business analysis, that's always the best place to start. One approach could have been to talk about what the different government departments are doing, but we thought we'd ask different customers of data, customers of the government, if you will, what kinds of information and what formats for that information they need. That's why we decided to take a cross-section of important sectors of the economy such as forestry, for example, and fishing and farming, small businesses and mining, and so on. So it's really valuable that you're intervening and giving us some guidance in terms of the government's direction with respect to open data.
I appreciate your comments, Mr. Mallett, about the local area data being very relevant for small business. It's a big challenge. I know in consumer packaged goods, for example, that large grocery chains will buy datasets from companies like Nielsen, Spectra, and IRI and they'll get very local information with respect to demand for categories of products. For example, they can get some insight into sales of basmati rice versus traditional long-grain rice versus arborio rice then they can start making certain business decisions based on that. They can look at gluten-free products, what's happening in that category, and then they can make some responses.
There's a real barrier for small businesses when it comes to buying that data because it's expensive. Now, these are companies that are in the business of providing that kind of information. I know that CFIB represents a very broad cross-section of businesses, but in areas like this is there something where the government can provide that information? It's information that the government collects, and it would be provided to small businesses...they can make certain investment decisions and business decisions. Can you think of examples of the kind of information that might be out there? And again, thinking across all of the different departments of government—immigration, health, natural resources; there's so much out there—what would small businesses be looking for?
:
I think the information that we wanted to collect has been largely along the lines of specific wage and price information. Actually, getting back to some of the information that we've been very happy with in the past, and that we recommended other members go see, is information pulled by Industry Canada from StatsCan on small-business benchmarking. It has very specific industry level financial indicators that help businesses understand what are typical financial ratios and relationships within their particular sector. Also, they're able to put some of their own financials in there to see if they are running above or below the general performance of businesses within their particular sector. So we strongly support those kinds of roles and so on.
Part of our challenge, and yours as well, is that we're dealing with such a wide variety of businesses, some of which are very forward-looking and probably have more information than we even know that they have, and they're using it very well, and others that really have no idea that this information is out there, and perhaps could help them in that respect. We've got such a wide variance that we want to support and so on. We're just trying to find a good average level of information that would help them.
In general, I think to the degree that we can find, again, the geographic detail....
Maybe one example that we've noted is that if you're looking for business register information, and that is what types of businesses are around in specific geographic regions, you can purchase that information from StatsCan for the national level. If you want the provincial level then it costs a little more. If you want the detailed municipal level, it costs a lot. But when you're buying the municipal level, you have to buy all of it for the entire country. Small firms are only looking for their particular region, whether it's Arnprior or Renfrew or perhaps some of those other areas. To a large degree, you cannot purchase the information or get the information for one specific area. You may have to get the entire country at that specific point. So to the degree that you can get that information....
Thank you.