Canada's
Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault is pushing for an open
government strategy similar to that of Australia, the U.S. or U.K.
"These
other three countries have definite plans and definite strategies to
put in place an open government model for their governments, and so
that's where we're lagging behind at this point," told The
Hill Times after she testified before the House Access to
Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee last Tuesday to speak on
open government as part of the committee's ongoing study of it.
Activists,
meanwhile, say they are frustrated with the slow pace of federal
progress on creating a central online library of publicly-funded data
that could help entrepreneurs and researchers across the country.
While the
British, Australian and American governments have led the way in
establishing online national government data portals, "We're not
even in the starting blocks, publicly," said David Eaves, a
Vancouver-based public policy entrepreneur and open government
activist.
The federal
government collects data every day on everything from weather to
employment insurance, immigration to homelessness. Mr. Eaves and
others advocate that the government unlock these swarms of datasets
by making them available for anyone to download online in accessible
formats for free.
It's something
on which municipal governments in Canada have led the way in recent
years. The municipal governments of Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, and
Edmonton are working on open data catalogue websites.
Individual
techies are doing the same. Mr. Eaves, for instance, just launched
emitter.ca to track pollution at a neighbourhood level using data
from Environment Canada's National Pollutant Release Inventory.
In Britain, one
of Prime Minister David Cameron's first orders of business when he
ascended to the top job last spring was to affirm his government's
commitment to opening up data. He set a timeline for his departments
to publish datasets.
The Australian
government tapped Mr. Eaves as part of its own Government 2.0
Taskforce. In responding to the taskforce's report, it created an
information commissioner's office and committed to a "culture of
public sector openness."
Both the United
Kingdom and United States have open government data online portals.
Meanwhile, the
Canadian government has taken baby steps.
The demand is
there. In consultations on an Industry Canada-led Digital Economy
Strategy this summer, one of the most popular ideas shared on an
online ideas forum was the creation of a public sector data portal.
At the committee
meeting, MPs heard that a handful of government departments, such as
Natural Resources Canada, Environment Canada and obvious institutions
like Statistics Canada and Library and Archives Canada, already post
scientific and numerical data online for Canadians.
Canada's chief
information officer, through the Treasury Board Secretariat,
developed a five-point plan in July, which includes a prototype for a
government data portal.
"The
government is considering these options," wrote Treasury Board
spokesperson Bob Makichuk in an email response to questions from The
Hill Times last week.
The Liberals
have released an open government platform to restore the mandatory
long-form census, make as many government datasets as possible
available online to the public for free, and post all Access to
Information requests, responses and response times online.
The Conservative
government scrapped a centralized system of Access to Information
requests early in its mandate, because it said it was inefficient.
Ms. Legault encouraged Treasury Board to direct institutions to post
lists of access requests online. Only four of 250 departments now do
it. They are her office, the Department of National Defence, Atlantic
Canada Opportunities Agency and Treasury Board.
"I don't
think we've ever had a government so closed. They talk about
transparency and accountability and it's anything but,"
complained Liberal MP Wayne Easter (Malpeque, P.E.I.).
The government
does have a Proactive Disclosure system of releasing travel and
hospitality expenses online for certain high-level public servants
and political staffers. The Conservative government also expanded the
scope of the Access to Information Act to include some 70 more
government institutions, including the CBC and Wheat Board.
"The
government is certainly supportive of open government," said
Conservative MP Pat Davidson (Sarnia-Lambton, Ont.) after the
meeting.
But if that's
the case, it's been fairly hard to tell, say activists such as Mr.
Eaves.
"I get the
sense it's starting to penetrate the thick barriers around Ottawa.
The very fact that the Ethics Committee is working on it shows it's
on people's radars," he said.
But that's just
a start. "I'd actually like to see a site that's up," he
said.
"If the
government is serious about innovation, it should model that
behaviour," said Mr. Eaves. "Data is an asset, and we need
to leverage the wazoo out of it. And we're not."
It will cost to
screen data for privacy, national security concerns, translate text
into both official languages, and develop the right licensing
agreements, he acknowledged, but said there are savings as well.
"The
biggest user of open data is government employees," he said.
"For years, trying to get a dataset from another minister,
another department, or even from your own minister, takes like five
meetings." An open online portal would create efficiencies.
And not only for
the government. If datasets are publicly available, entrepreneurs can
find ways to use them in creative ways, add value to them and make
money by selling the resultant product or service.
Now, the
government data mining process is frustratingly slow, said Tracey
Lauriault, a consultant and researcher with Carleton University's
Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre.
First, she said
she has to find where the data is she needs, figure out who in the
government to contact to get it, ask for it and then negotiate access
through, discussions about licensing and fees once its found.
"So you
started research in January. Maybe by August, you can get maybe those
data. You may be told, 'No,' after eight months. But your funding for
your research project is a year, so you've wasted eight months of
your time for data," she said.
With the notable
exception or NRCan, which has an excellent online scientific datasets
portal, she said the government has very little data online, and if
so it's hard to find.
What's worse,
government departments are so tightly bound by jurisdiction that they
don't easily share datasets with each other and have no
government-wide data library, she said.
Plus, agencies
such as the Canadian Institute for Health Information and Social
Science Research Council, that give public money for research, don't
have agreements in place with which to collect the data they've
funded to create.
"They have
no clue what they've funded because they don't collect data that
they've paid for. They don't have a library to put it in," said
Ms. Lauriault. "We are at such a ground zero situation in Canada
for data."
She blames
Canada's nascent state on a number of factors including a lack of
standards, mandate, legal framework and even accountability. It might
make governments nervous to put reams of data online that could be
used against them by their critics.
In the end, what
will be needed to implement an open government strategy, including
public access to government data, is a cultural shift in the public
service, said Ms. Legault.
"The
culture now is more reactive in the sense that we have more of a
tendency to disclose information once we receive specific Access to
Information request. We have some proactive disclosure, but we don't
have a very strong culture of disclosing datasets that we are
producing as public sector data on an ongoing basis to our citizens,
nor do we necessarily have a very strong embedded culture of
interacting with our citizens and making them participate in the
development of our program and policies."
Tracey P. Lauriault
<input onclick="if(typeof(jsCall)=='function'){jsCall();}else{setTimeout('jsCall()',500);}" id="jsProxy" type="hidden">
Locked
